
Class 

Book 



Copyright N?._ 



CQFHUGHT DEHJSm 



UNO FFICIAL 
CHRISTIANITY 

BY 

SHELTON BISSELL, B.D. 




BOSTON 
RICHARD G. BADGER 

THE GORHAM PRESS 



Copyright, 191 8 by Richard G. Badger 



All Rights Reserved 






fFR IB !9)8 



Made in the United States of America 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



©CLA492287 gf f QQ/*& 



FOREWORD 

These little sermons were preached by the 
author in the First Congregational Church of 
Boise, Idaho, during the late winter of 19 16-19 17. 
At their conclusion the earnest wish was expressed 
by the members of his Religious Education Com- 
mittee, at the head of which stood Dr. E. O. Sis- 
son, Commissioner of State Education, that they 
should be published. 

This has been done in the earnest hope that 
some who have failed to find bread in much of 
official creeds and platforms of Christianity, may 
at least be encouraged to continue to look to Christ 
himself for food. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Changing Ideas 9 

II Changeless Ideals 21 

III Getting Rid of an Excommunicated 

God 34 

IV The Use and Misuse of the Bible . . 44 
V The World, the Flesh, and the Devil 56 

VI Times, Sacraments and the Man . . 65 

VII Just Being Good 75 

VIII The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 86 



UNOFFICIAL CHRISTIANITY 



CHAPTER I 

CHANGING IDEAS 



THE impression that the golden age lies to 
the rear is one of the persisting fallacies of 
all time. Tennyson was true to human nature 
when he observed that 

u The past will always win 
A glory from its being far, 
And orb into the perfect star 
We saw not when we moved therein. " 

In many quarters it is still more popular to 
eulogize one's ancestry than to emphasize one's 
posterity. This opinion, in the minds of people, 
that we have somehow run by the millennium with- 
out knowing it, is due largely to the fact that we 
have lost a good many orthodox anchors. But 
these disquieted souls are oblivious of the equally 
patent fact, that each age forges its own anchors. 
Different times grow different opinions as in- 
evitably as different zones grow different plants. 

9 



io Unofficial Christianity 

The supreme business of the church is not to 
cherish a deposit of truth once delivered to the 
saints, but to cultivate the garden where the tree 
of truth grows. Christian dogma never yet has 
expressed truth fully, — it has approximated it, 
and this will continue to be the method indefinitely. 
Thinking about life and living out life do not stand 
in opposite armed camps. Though the former 
never fully explains or accounts for the latter, it 
will never cease to hold the attention of men. 
The deeper we think, the closer we come to God, 
who is supreme Mind. "We think God's thoughts 
after Him." 

Religion in the twentieth century will have dif- 
ferent ideas about the world and itself than had 
religion in any other century. 

I. Its Universe is Vaster. The area wherein 
its God once moved was "a right little, tight little," 
comfortably compact and precisely measurable uni- 
verse. On a waste of waters floated the earth. 
Over it arched the solid convex firmament. Above 
the firmament was another waste of waters. In 
the firmament were windows, and in the earth 
were doors, and when the windows above and 
the doors below were opened, the rain fell and 
the waters rose. From east to west, a little 
journey, ran the sun each day, like a "strong man, 
delighting to run a race." In his brief span he 
measured the entire heavens. Thus the earth was 



Changing Ideas n 

the centre of the solar and siderial movements. 
And "above the circle of the earth" sat the an- 
thropomorphic God. To him men looked up, — a 
static God, permanently resident in a static heaven. 
From it he made occasional excursions to see 
what men were doing. To it men aspired to climb, 
building a tower until God in self-defense brought 
their work to naught by a babel of tongues. Thus 
theology was built out of a geo-centric universe, 
a static heaven, an anthropomorphic and architect 
God, — and the whole scheme, God and all, was 
not much bigger than the scroll on which men 
wrote it down. 

But long ago Copernicus smashed this universe 
to bits when he demonstrated that the earth went 
round the sun, not the sun round the earth. Later, 
the telescope infinitely enlarged the boundaries of 
the universe until our brains reel under the con- 
cept of immensity. We envy the nonchalance with 
which men of science casually tell us that light, 
traveling 186,000 miles a second, takes three and 
a half years to reach us from Alpha Centauri, the 
nearest of the fixed stars. And if we have the 
patience to calculate how far distant this star lies 
from us, we are then asked to compute the distance 
of the farthest star, the light from which, starting 
when King Solomon built his temple, is just arriv- 
ing on this earth. 

The theology of orthodoxy, however, is not 



12 Unofficial Christianity 

built on these facts. It still sets up its localized 
heaven and hell, its limited universe of space, its 
architect and anthropomorphic God. And yet 
heaven is not above the earth, nor hell beneath, 
for there is no up nor down in the universe, but 
only out. God is not a builder retired from busi- 
ness, who in definite and measurable manner by 
rule of thumb constructed a compact and delimited 
celestial system once upon a time; for the system 
is not yet made, and is never the same from mo- 
ment to moment, and no one can comprehend the 
bounds thereof, for it has no bounds. These 
earlier notions of cosmogeny, celestial geography 
and the sporadic activity of deity have passed 
away from the realm of educated thought; but 
they remain embedded in the dogmas of ecclesi- 
asticism. 

II. Its Time is Infinitely Extended. The idea 
of a definitely ascertained date on which things 
began to be, is a prime essential of the doctrines 
of orthodoxy. Man emerged from nothingness 
upon a certain day, 4004 years before Christ. All 
the vast, complex, and differentiated life of this 
planet has been crowded into this brief 5900 years 
since that time. Races, nations, literature, the 
arts and sciences, civilization, culture, — all these 
have been born and cradled and reared and many 
of them have died and been buried within this all 
too short span. Now the very brevity of this 



Changing Ideas 1 3 

world process necessitated a scheme of special and 
instantaneous creation. Six thousand years were 
not long enough for gradual growth. God must 
start some things at maturity. As Athene sprang 
full-armed from the head of Zeus, so biological 
species and ranks and orders leaped fully de- 
veloped from the earth. Yet, although we know 
that the longevity of great trees and the testimony 
of fossiliferous strata, the accumulated sediment 
of rivers and the logic of the growth of society, 
all point to an immeasurably longer time of human 
habitation, and organic and inorganic develop- 
ment on this earth, than the paltry 6000 years 
allowed by the theory of fiat and special creation, 
the conception of a definitely begun, a something- 
out-of-nothing-made, and a short careered universe 
still keep their tenacious grip upon orthodox 
theology. The longevity, if not the infinity of the 
time processes of creation, has not sufficiently im- 
pressed the minds of the makers of the doctrines 
of orthodoxy, to lead them to reject the obsolete 
and discredited, for the true and proven. 

III. Its Man is Nobler. More significant are 
the changing ideas about man. Original sin and 
total depravity have been the twin mill-stones 
about the neck of humanity. 

"In Adam's fall 
We sinned all," 



14 Unofficial Christianity 

was more than a nursery jingle, — it was a por- 
tentous doctrinal announcement of doom. From 
this oracular version of an ancient Semitic legend 
has come a whole theology of pessimism and 
human helplessness. It created for itself a termin- 
ology abounding in such words and phrases as 
"total surrender, our lost estate, moral inability, 
worthless worms, broken and empty vessels," and 
it magnified God's grace into everything, and 
whittled man's grit down to nothing. 

To-day men believe that they are saved, not 
by being supplanted by God, but by being supple- 
mented by him. Otherwise creation would seem 
to have been a waste of God's time. They hold 
that if Adam tainted the race, God has had 
plenty of time since to make it wholesome. They 
assert that what man needs is not surrender but 
discovery. They believe that humanity, raised to 
its highest potentiality, is divinity. In brief : that 
salvation consists in true self-expression through 
God-contact, not in self-repression through God- 
usurpation. 

Yet a single glance through the pages of the 
present day theology of orthodoxy will convince 
one that its doctrines are still deduced from the 
discarded premises of "depravity and fallen 
estate," and that it is still sceptical of the ability 
of man to do very much for himself, despite the 
fact of his divine kinship. 






Changing Ideas 15 

Once, also, and not so long ago, man was a 
duality or a trinity. Body warred against spirit, 
and flesh against soul. Or mind and soul and body 
were engaged in internecine strife. From this idea 
came asceticism, and the hurtful practices of flesh- 
mortifications and flagellations, for the sake of the 
emancipation and exaltation of the enslaved spirit. 
This dichotomy and trichotomy of the person has 
done its injurious work upon the body of Chris- 
tian thought for centuries, and to-day its baleful 
effect is felt in every organ. Squarely antagonistic 
to this is the truth of this age, that personality is 
a unity. So nicely blended are the elements of 
body and spirit that what helps and hurts the one, 
helps and hurts the other. The properties of the 
bodies are not devilish, bastard, and hostile to 
the properties of the mind. They are rather the 
legitimate instruments of the real person, the self- 
knowing and self-directing ego. Modern psychol- 
ogy, as all really know, insists upon the closest and 
most intimate relation between the interacting 
body and mind. 

But the theology of orthodoxy is still permeated 
with the doctrine of man's duality or trinity, with 
the cognate thought of the opposition of the one 
to the other. Paul's dictum of a "warring to- 
gether of flesh and spirit" has been twisted out 
of its figuratively spiritual meaning, and has been 
given a literal metaphysical construction which the 



1 6 Unofficial Christianity 

words do not warrant. 

So, too, man was once thought to be inspired 
through a kind of temporary soul-dispossession or 
suspended animation. His individuality was dis- 
carded for the time being. He was literally "not 
himself.'' He fell into a kind of holy swoon and 
saw visions and heard voices. Or he became a 
mere automaton, — a pen-point in the hand of the 
Almighty. He was an amanuensis, and wrote 
what God dictated. Now this was a quite logical 
deduction from the doctrine of man's total de- 
pravity. Of and by himself, man could not think 
or know or do one true or holy thing. Hence God 
had to pour him full of revelation, as a cup is 
poured full of water. Man had to guard against 
mixing up any ideas of his own with the ideas of 
God. He could be God's private secretary and 
take down at his dictation what he uttered, — no 
more. As a passive channel through which the 
wisdom of the Almighty might trickle, he was a 
success now and then. As an interpreter of truth 
through the medium of his own unenlightened in- 
telligence and personal experience, he was a de- 
lusion and a snare. 

Now, however, it is believed on the best of 
evidence that inspiration means raising a man's 
individuality to its highest terms, not reducing it 
to the vanishing point. The portion of truth which 
each man utters is colored and characterized by 



Changing Ideas 17 

the peculiar temperament and prepossessions of 
the speaker. Moral and religious predispositions 
will affect the quality of his message to this extent, 
— that they will give to that nugget of truth which 
the speaker has found, that quality of alloy which 
is inevitably associated with his fallible nature. 
As the water takes its color from the soil through 
which it flows, so the utterance of truth takes its 
hue from the individuality of the speaker who is 
its mouthpiece. New psychology does not deny 
revelation, it denies the old mechanical Suspended 
animation" ideas of the method of revelation. It 
finds the channel of communication between the 
individual and God in that sensitive submerged 
self, the sub-conscious, upon which the mind of 
eternal Truth plays as a musician upon his instru- 
ment. Even as the musician can express only im- 
perfectly, according to the limitations of his instru- 
ment, the thought of the composer, so can the ideal 
of truth be mirrored forth but dimly and partially. 
Man does not passively record the picture of God 
like a sensitive photographic plate, but actively 
takes the phase of truth which he has found, and 
gives it shape and color and expression as it passes 
through the seething crucible of his thoughts. 

IV. Its Processes are Inductive. Long ago 
men abandoned a priori methods of investigation. 
Bacon showed the folly of starting with a theory 
and then hunting for facts to fit the theory. Ex- 



1 8 Unofficial Christianity 

periences are the final test. We begin with them, 
and out of them we derive our principles of 
thought and action. We examine the universe 
and find in it order, system, unity, and regularity. 
We conclude, therefore, that there is a mind and 
will behind this cosmos, and we call this mind and 
will, "God." Once men would have begun with 
an idea about God, which they had excogitated 
from metaphysics, or logic, or fancy, and would 
have bent the facts to fit the theory, no matter 
what resulted to the facts. 

The inductive process is more widely operative 
than we suspect. There is not a cherished conven- 
tion or institution which is not being weighed in 
the scales of induction. Do the facts of life, the 
needs of humanity, the large axiomatic and in- 
dubitable verities, intuitively known, warrant these 
same conventions and institutions? If not, must 
they be merely modified, or swept aside in totof 
The church, the state, the marriage relation, the 
home, the school, — these time-honored institu- 
tions, cherished and enriched by Christianity, must 
defend themselves against a growing clamor of 
criticism. If these institutions will minister to the 
fundamental needs of social man, if they will in- 
crease his vitality, dignity, and happiness, then 
they will stand. But if, in our highly complex and 
rapidly socializing civilization, these ancient con- 
ventions, like lumbering stage-coaches, will not 






Changing Ideas 19 

carry mankind safely and swiftly along the high- 
way of life, then they must be superseded by other 
vehicles more adapted to the time. Thus we start, 
not with an a priori theory about the inviolability 
and everlasting sanctity of these institutions upon 
which we have built our modern world, but rather 
we start with experiences, aspirations, intuitions; 
and rigidly insist that these shall be conserved by 
the habits and conventions of society. Even if this 
method of induction should be highly inconvenient 
to religious practices, it undoubtedly has come to 
stay, and theology ought to make the most of it. 
But it is quite evident that the method of ortho- 
doxy is to make the institution — the church, the 
Sabbath, the sacrament, marriage, home and the 
like — the primary and paramount thing, whether 
the needs of a modern world are met adequately 
by them or not. 

Evolution — which is another way of saying 
that organic life, individual and social, becomes 
differentiated through forces operating and in- 
herent within each body rather than through spe- 
cial acts of creation and modification exerted from 
without the body — is known to-day to be the 
method of progress. It is all the more regrettable, 
therefore, that evolution is anathema maranatha 
to the theology of orthodoxy, and that those who 
wear its sign and own its sway may not hope to 
enter the portals of an officially accredited evan- 



20 Unofficial Christianity 

gelical faith. 

Honestly to recognize changing ideas, and to 
adjust the timeless principles of religion to the 
temporary thought-forms of the day so that re- 
ligion may not be a thing apart, antique, and mis- 
understood, is the heroic task of the Christian 
world. Truth is a matter of all times, and has 
resources for all needs. From whatever point of 
compass the wind may blow, the mariner uses the 
same rudder to steer him to the desired haven. 

"New occasions teach new duties, 

Time makes ancient good uncouth, 
He must upward go, and onward, 
Who would keep abreast of truth." 



CHAPTER II 



CHANGELESS IDEALS 



AN idea is passive, an ideal is active. An ideal 
is an idea in motion, accomplishing some- 
thing, — that has the power to make the one who 
cherishes it its disciple, defender, crusader. An 
ideal is able to recruit men, set them to work, 
arouse energy. An ideal is an idea dynamized and 
magnetized. An idea is the object of men's con- 
templation; an ideal, the object of their convic- 
tion. The former is a picture to view; the latter, 
a motive to drive. Men hold the idea of knowl- 
edge, and about it they speculate, argue, discuss. 
They may admire and exalt it, but not follow it. 
But men hold the ideal of knowledge, and for it 
they will sacrifice health and comfort, toward it 
they will struggle with grim determination, and in 
comparison with it they will count all earthly 
riches and treasure as mere dross. 

This being so, it follows that a man is worth his 
ideals, not his ideas. The former persist, the 
latter change. The latter touch the periphery of a 
man, the former become immanent in his moral 

21 



22 Unofficial Christianity 

consciousness. If religion seems open to convic- 
tion on the charge of failing to meet ideas, she be- 
comes vindicated as exalting ideals. So long as 
she inspires men to seek ends, rather than to think 
on means, so long will she be invincible. 

There are three ideals at least which religion 
has never lost, and which, as religion, she never 
can lose. These ideals, it is true, sometimes have 
been repudiated by pseudo-religion, dogmatism, 
and ecclesiasticism. But the life of genuine re- 
ligion depends upon them, and to them the truly 
religious man will cling. They are : 

I. Sincerity, an ideal affecting the integrity of 
a man's soul. 

II. Loyalty , an ideal affecting a man's rela- 
tion to God. 

III. Unity, an ideal affecting a man's relations 
to his fellows. 

I. Sincerity. There is only one thing more 
disastrous than dishonesty toward others, and 
that is dishonesty toward oneself. Unless one is 
absolutely sincere with his own soul he cannot be 
sincere with others. Jesus found an appalling 
amount of insincerity being palmed off as genuine 
piety. He was compelled to call the respectable 
hypocrites of his day by some harsh names in 
order to do justice to his feelings, and to them. 
"Whitewashed sepulchres" and "dirty cups and 
platters" were some of the richly deserved epi- 



Changeless Ideals 23 

thets which he applied to them. This he did, 
primarily, because they were trying to fool people. 
They began by fooling themselves, and ended, 
of course, by fooling most everybody else. 

The need of sincerity was never more urgent, 
largely because the demand of society, politics, ec- 
clesiasticism is "conformity." In college life a 
man who breaks with sacred tradition "queers 
himself." In politics, a man who leaves his party 
is disciplined. In society, a man who defies custom 
is ostracised. In ecclesiasticism, a man who re- 
nounces orthodoxy is banned. Seldom is the ques- 
tion raised: "If these excommunicants are sin- 
cere, should not their opinions be tolerated, even 
respected?" Conformity is not a sure prophylac- 
tic. Sincerity is. A tainted community will be dis- 
infected more quickly through heresy than through 
orthodoxy, if perchance the former is sincere and 
the latter not. 

The very life of religion depends upon sincerity. 
It is not going to be a child's task to preserve 
this life. The, official creeds are barnacled with 
doctrines which many honest men must repudiate. 
Yet there are those who conform to these creeds 
who cannot sincerely believe them. This seems a 
monstrous charge to make. But facts bear out 
this assertion. Those who hold holy orders in one 
of the historic churches of Christendom must 
agree that "divine grace can come to man only 



24 Unofficial Christianity 

through the medium of an unbroken apostolic suc- 
cession." This means that in no other way, save 
through the sacrament of Holy Communion ad- 
ministered by a priest in that particular church, 
can the good, healthy life of God get into a man. 
Yet one who speaks from an intimate acquaint- 
anceship with the church in question, and who 
speaks uncontradicted, says: "Everybody knows 
that there are numbers of Anglican clergymen who 
do not believe that the charismatic gift is de- 
pendent upon an unbroken apostolic succession. 
. . . Everybody knows also that no layman, not 
even a non-conformist minister, can take orders in 
the Anglican church without submitting to that ec- 
clesiastical ceremony by which he professes his be- 
lief in that doctrine. " 

Will any one doubt that there are large numbers 
of worshipers who in their hearts honestly ques- 
tion the truth of the assertion that Jesus was "con- 
ceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin 
Mary," and yet who glibly patter the Apostolic 
Creed each Sunday? Even in the articles of faith 
of the so-called more liberal churches, there are 
items referring to the infallibility of the scriptures, 
the metaphysical nature of the Trinity, and the 
substitutionary method of the atonement, which 
should be expunged in the interest of strict hon- 
esty. "The world will little note nor long re- 
member" any creed the adherents of which are 



Changeless Ideals 25 

with reason suspected of holding it with certain 
strong mental reservations, or disingenuous ex- 
planations, "Let your speech be yea, yea; nay, 
nay;" said the great Master of sincerity, and 
added, "whatsoever is more than these cometh of 
evil." And the implication may be as strongly in 
the direction of creeds that mean exactly what 
they say, as in the direction of a speech unadorned 
by expletives. 

The prime business of a Christian is to as- 
semble the facts of life; mobilize the experiences; 
marshal the intuitions; then examine them with 
honesty, humility, and a mind hospitable to truth ; 
heat them all with the fire of a pure enthusiasm, 
fusing them together for a great and unselfish pur- 
pose; and then, whatever the result may be, to 
hold to it. Let a man "will to believe." Let him 
bring to bear all the desire to be orthodox that he 
may. There will be unique occasions when what 
appears from the seething caldron is not the con- 
viction which he had anticipated. There will be 
times when the bland egg of creed may hatch an 
ugly duckling. And all the orthodox barn-yard 
fowls may cackle at him that he has got an "unde- 
sirable barn-yard citizen," and with many a cruel 
peck they will banish him from the domestic pre- 
cincts. But he knows that though it be not a prop- 
er duckling, it has a right to lie on the straw and 
sail on the pond. And some day, in the slow turn- 



26 Unofficial Christianity 

ing of the wheel of time, it will prove to be a glori- 
ous swan. 

Let Christianity beware of compromising with 
sincerity for the sake of orthodoxy. 

II. Loyalty. The religion of the twentieth 
century will insist upon that heart-attachment to 
the eternal God which shall save men. Nothing 
short of that kind of loyalty will avail. It was 
the only loyalty that counted with Christ. He em- 
phatically asserted that there was no law greater 
than allegiance to God with heart and mind and 
soul and strength. This puts all of a man in inti- 
mate contact with God. In feeling, in thinking, 
in aspirations, in his physical powers, even, he is 
to be an unswerving partisan of the Almighty. 

Now loyalty, as a virtue, is not unknown to the 
theology of orthodoxy. But it is the minor and 
subordinate loyalty to sacraments, formulae, 
rituals, institutions and dogmatic infallibles. 
All these may be short of God. In point of fact, 
they generally are. The proof of this is found in 
the refusal of orthodoxy to abate its creed one jot 
or tittle in the face of radical and sweeping modi- 
fications of men's ideas of God. The rigidity of 
orthodoxy convicts it of disloyalty to the very 
principle about which it claims to be most ortho- 
dox. In utter loyalty a man may break with a 
theology. What happens? He is damned by the 
adherents of that theology. And for what? For 



Changeless Ideals 27 

disloyalty to the theology without reference to 
God. He who doubts this, easily may make the 
test. It will be necessary for him merely to ex- 
press his opinion that the ideal of the Kingdom is 
independent of any belief in the total inerrancy of 
Scripture, the substitutionary nature of the atone- 
ment, the virgin birth, the physical resurrection, 
the metaphysical trinity, the observance of the 
sacraments of baptism and the Supper, a spatial 
and material heaven and hell, and a membership 
in an evangelical church. Startling results will be 
sure to follow. Honestly believing all this, this 
same belief will not be "counted unto him for 
righteousness." His shrift will be short and his 
excommunication long. He has been disloyal to 
orthodoxy, — what matter about his loyalty to 
God? 

As the demands of this age are for sincerity in 
the first place, so it inevitably follows that if a 
man's sincerity leads him to break with orthodoxy 
in the interest of loyalty to God, there shall be 
nothing but approval for the departure. This 
demand will result in more flexible creeds, so con- 
structed as to be adjustable to honest modifications 
of convictions which occur from time to time. 
The heresy of the twentieth century is going to 
be insincerity in the first place, and then, as a 
corollary, loyalty to a creed which is disloyal to 
God. To make it possible for a man to be both 



28 Unofficial Christianity 

loyal to God and loyal to creed, will be the stimu- 
lating task of the religion of this age. 

III. Unity. This is the ideal which affects a 
man's relations to his fellows. In sheer self- 
defense to-day, the church is putting this in the 
fore-front of its platforms. The alarming evi- 
dences of disintegration, so visible on every hand, 
may be unerringly traced to the schismatic spirit 
of sectarianism, which has made the church im- 
potent to mitigate the woes of a world in torment. 

But at the very outset a distinction between 
unity and uniformity should be drawn. Nor is 
this done in a spirit of casuistry, nor in the inter- 
ests of an ecclesiastical system. It is not intended 
to becloud the issue through logomachy. The 
argument is not to run thus: 

i. The demand is for uniformity. 

2. Doing away with sectarianism would 
mean uniformity. 

3. But unity, not uniformity, is the real 
need. 

4. Hence we shall not help matters by 
interfering. 

The argument will run, rather: 

1. The demand is for unity. 

2. Doing away with sectarianism would 
mean uniformity, not necessarily unity. 

3. A modified sectarianism would mean 
unity. 



Changeless Ideals 29 

4. Hence let us modify sectarianism, not 

do away with it. 

Uniformity is an outward, artificial, and non- 
vital agreement in method and order. Unity is 
an inner, spontaneous, and vital agreement in 
spirit and principle. You may have heterogeneity 
and lack of cohesion, and yet have uniformity. 
Yiou may have dissimilarity in form and variety in 
expression and yet have unity. There may be 
unity in a democracy of states, differing widely in 
their several characteristics. There may be lack 
of unity in a monarchy, all parts of which look and 
act alike. For religion to demand uniformity, 
therefore, would be for it to ask for a stone in- 
stead of a loaf. For it to demand unity, however, 
is simply for it to adopt life-saving precautions. 
If it can have unity by preserving all of the sects, 
they will be preserved; if it can have unity by 
destroying some of them, it will destroy them. 
The prime demand is unity, not uniformity. 

A little consideration will convince any honest 
person that to persist and do its work and cope 
with hostile forces, themselves united, religion 
must make a much more serious-minded and reso- 
lute effort toward unity than it has heretofore 
made. No half-hearted compromises will avail. 
There must be sacrifice, the heroic cutting down to 
the quick, the true unselfish renunciation of cher- 
ished, but non-essential religious hobbies. The 



30 Unofficial Christianity 

liberal will have to surrender some things, as well 
as the conservative, for the former has gone as 
far ahead of the procession as the latter has fallen 
behind. The process is going to be a painful one, 
and there is going to be weeping and wailing and 
gnashing of teeth. But it is the only way. 

Some churches are ready even now. As a rule, 
they stand midway between the rear and advance 
guard. They have announced their willingness 
to seek a common ground of conviction with other 
communions. They may not believe that it is 
necessary to abolish the institutional forms by 
means of which they work, simply in order to 
agree in spirit with those who hold other forms. 
But they are resolved never to allow ritual, rubric, 
sacrament, polity, or ecclesiastical tradition to 
stand between them and a good, healthy, sympa- 
thetic understanding with their neighbor denom- 
inations. When this spirit appears, unity is not 
far away. 

It may make its approach along any one of sev- 
eral different avenues. It may come from lands 
of far suns and alien tongues, where the pagan, 
for his very soul's sake, must not suspect a divided 
Christendom. Here the missionary becomes an 
"Episco-presby-gationalist," combining the best 
that there is in one polity, with the best that there 
is in the others. For the untutored savage and the 
sophisticated oriental alike, it would be a fatal in- 



Changeless Ideals 31 

dictment against Christianity to differentiate be- 
tween the various cross-breeds and hybrids of 
Protestant faith which are on exhibition in the 
Occident. "Is Christ divided?'' would be the 
more-than-silencing rejoinder of the object of an 
evangelizing solicitude, to sectarian invitation. 
Back to the sluggish and muddied stream of a 
European and American conventionalized Chris- 
tianity may yet flow the purer waters of an Asian 
or African faith in Jesus, quickening and purify- 
ing the former, not the least evidence of which 
shall be the birth of the spirit of Christian unity. 
Or the very urgency of the present world crisis, 
which has well-nigh overwhelmed the church in 
Europe under the threefold indictment of infi- 
delity, inefficiency and imbecility, may operate to 
wipe out the schismatic spirit. For generations the 
established and non-established churches of the 
British Empire have stood locked in combat, each 
grimly determined to abate not a jot the classic 
hostility which they piously have received as a 
legacy from former generations. To-day the face 
of the world has changed. The trenches have 
made strange bedfellows. In the withering fire of 
death, old controversies have been forgotten. 
Back from the battle-front come the healing in- 
fluences. Says a leading spokesman for the non- 
liturgists, "relations between Anglicans and Non- 
conformists are more cordial than they have ever 



32 Unofficial Christianity 

been." In accepting an invitation to occupy the 
pulpit of the leading and most militant non-con- 
formist church in England, the Dean of Durham, 
speaking as a high official in the Established 
church, remarks: "I hold it the plainest duty of 
the parent church of England to draw closer and 
make effective for service the spiritual links which 
unite the divided sections of English-speaking 
Christendom in an unexpressed but conscious 
unity." 

From another quarter the approach may con- 
ceivably come. The American clergyman, 
recognizing the loss of efficiency in the present sys- 
tem, whereby one minister is required to be an 
expert in many lines, thereby proving inept in some 
of them, pleads for such specialization and dif- 
ferentiation among the clergy, that the one who 
is most fitted for a certain department of Chris- 
tian labor may devote his whole time to that par- 
ticular work. Thus the one who possesses the 
homiletical gift predominantly shall not be com- 
pelled to squander his time and ability upon de- 
tails of administration, teaching, pastoral work, or 
social service. He shall be a preacher, supremely 
and exclusively, with the necessary time for study 
and the fusing of thought in the fires of meditation 
and feeling. The one who possesses peculiar 
teaching ability shall devote his entire time to re- 
ligious education in the church and community. 



Changeless Ideals * 33 

Thus the specialization shall continue. But, by 
the nature of the case, this involves a more united 
Christian polity than we have. There must be 
amalgamation, re-grouping, elimination, a general 
re-arrangement of Protestant divisions, and a 
consequent reduction of separate competing bodies 
in every community if this is to be adopted. Small 
matters of disagreement in doctrine and polity 
must be dropped overboard by common consent. 
Comity and co-operation must be the watchword 
of the hour. In the Middle-West this scheme is 
seriously and vigorously advanced by the pastor of 
a large Baptist church. Asked whether, in the 
necessary abandonment of cherished views in 
order to bring about unity, he will be willing to 
make the form of baptism an optional one as be- 
tween sprinkling and immersion, he replies: 
"Whether we Baptists would make concessions in 
order to bring about the federation I suggest, so 
far as I am concerned personally, I should say 
'yes' with great emphasis, and there are scores and 
hundreds of younger men in our denomination that 
feel exactly as I do." 

Unofficial Christianity of the twentieth century 
is to be characterized by ideals, rather than ideas. 
Up to the present the latter, not the former, have 
been predominant. Among the most potent forces 
which will rule Christian men and women in this 
age will be sincerity, loyalty, and unity. 



CHAPTER III 

GETTING RID OF AN EXCOMMUNICATED GOD 

THERE are two contrasting cries which come 
up to us out of the heart of the Old Testa- 
ment. The one is the despairing utterance of a 
God-fearing man who felt himself deserted by the 
Almighty in the hour of his crisis, and whose 
plaintive lament was, u Oh, that I knew where I 
might find him !" The other was the lofty rhetori- 
cal question of a soul transfigured, 

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit, 

And whither shall I flee from thy presence?" 

The difference between these two cries, is the 
difference between the query where God is, and 
the query where God is not. It is the difference 
between the faith that God is somewhere, and 
that he is everywhere. The latter is the word of 
belief, but the former is not the word of 
infidelity. Both are expressions of faith at dif- 
ferent stages of religious development. The 
former means a God detached, remote, per- 
manently residing apart from his creation, with 

34 



Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 35 

arrivals and departures according to a time- 
schedule, "subject to change without notice," 
characterized by interventions and special provi- 
dences, miracles, and theophanies. The latter 
means a God at hand, indwelling, permanently 
residing within his creation, controlling and in- 
forming it, as a spirit dominates a body, continu- 
ally expressing his will in the modus operandi of 
the universe, and so glorifying the natural order, 
that "every common bush's aflame with God." 

Granting that the religion of the twentieth cen- 
tury must conceive of God under the thought 
forms of immanence, it remains to offer a suffi- 
cient apologetic in the face of the partisans of the 
theology of orthodoxy, who may not be acquitted 
of defending the doctrine of a detached and 
transcendent God, and therefore one who is more 
somewhere than everywhere. Now God cannot 
be both wholly within his creation, and at the same 
time wholly without it. It would be a contradic- 
tion in terms and in fact. But just as the true 
Jesus was within the visible, physical body; so the 
Almighty is within his creation. If this latter is 
the vital and prevailing view to-day, it may be de- 
fended on two grounds : first, our relation to God 
is a moral, not a mechanical one; second, our rela- 
tion to him is a natural, not a formal one. 

I. Our Relation to God is a Moral, not a Me- 
chanical One. Our starting point must be the 



36 Unofficial Christianity 

presence of certain inconsistent and even antagon- 
istic elements in the world. Sin, evil, suffering, 
death, — these have to be accounted for without 
being disloyal to a God who is, by the nature of 
the case, both all-powerful and all-good. Some, 
like John Stuart Mill and, more recently, George 
Bernard Shaw, frankly wash their hands of such 
a hypothetical God. The former propounds his 
famous dilemma, — u Either God could have pre- 
vented evil and did not, — or he would have 
prevented evil, and could not. If I accept the first, 
I conclude that he is not all good. If I accept the 
second, then he is not all-powerful." Having led 
us into the maze, Mill leaves us there to find our 
way out, although for himself, he would frankly 
sacrifice God's omnipotence in order to save his 
benevolence. Shaw cheerfully chooses the same 
alternative, also, with this quite Shavianesque sug- 
gestion, that God himself, with the very best of 
intentions, is only experimenting and approximat- 
ing at good, doing the best with the material he 
has on hand, but impotent to get better results. 

Now if the majority of us are constrained to re- 
ject both of these explanations, what remains? 
The believer in a non-resident Deity answers that 
evil has been precipitated into the universe by an 
all-wise power for inscrutable but good and suffi- 
cient reasons, and that at certain indeterminate 
times he will intervene in order to give the uni- 



Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 37 

verse a shove toward righteousness, or repair the 
damage done by the depraved wills of men, or 
rectify some vagrant tendency in nature. Thus we 
get the "interventionalist" type of Christian, who 
looks to see Satan bound and cast into the pit, and 
who ardently awaits the coming of the great and 
glorious day when Jesus shall return and set up 
his Kingdom. In brief, the only logical conclusion 
to which we are driven if we accept the premise 
of a transcendent God who is at the same time 
both all-powerful and all-good, is the mechanical 
one. But note where that leads. Goodness is to be 
accomplished by God through coercion. God be- 
comes an infinite arbiter with power to compel his 
decisions. Man yields because he must; God gets 
what he wants, that is all. The millennium is to 
arrive because God produces it, not because man is 
ready for it. It is a kind of transcendent case of 
u might makes right." 

On the other hand, we are convinced that this 
is a moral universe. There is no satisfaction in 
thinking that God by dint of superior prowess 
is going to get what he is after in the end. In 
point of fact, man is not made good, he becomes 
good. For God to arrive from without periodi- 
cally and by special dispensation repair the uni- 
verse, would simply mean that he could make men 
behave themselves, — it would not mean that men 
were becoming good. Even so, a magisterial 



38 Unofficial Christianity 

disciplinarian might interfere to compose the vio- 
lence of a turbulent company, and by dint of physi- 
cal prowess or direful threat produce an appear- 
ance of calm. But there can be no real solution 
of evil until man desires to be right. Omnipotence 
cannot do more than make men refrain from evil, 
man must choose to be good himself. 

This suggests what really has happened. God, 
ever with us, ever the indwelling spirit of the 
visible world, ever has willed good to us. As free 
spirits derived from him, we are allowed to accept 
his good intentions or not as we choose. Anything 
short of that would mean an artificial, toy universe 
for God to play with. In the clash of wills, hu- 
man and divine, God's sometimes goes down. 
"Gipsy" Smith used to say: "God can open the 
blind eye, or unstop the deaf ear, or paint a lily- 
bell, or form a dewdrop, or create the trill of 
the bird-song, or open the gates of the morning 
without a creak of their hinges, or set an atom 
swinging in the sunshine, with all its rhythm and 
poetry, as much as in the movement of a constella- 
tion; but he can save no man against his will." To 
become good, man must will to be good. He may 
overthrow God's good intentions for him. But the 
end of God's defeat is the beginning of man's edu- 
cation. The problem of a moral universe is to 
bring it to pass that man shall choose to follow 
after good, not that man shall be compelled to 



Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 39 

make good. It is when we ask, seek, knock, that 
the normal relations are established. As Victor 
Hugo put it, "Nothing is so stupid as conquering, 
the true glory is in convincing." And God is not 
stupid enough merely to overwhelm us, he must 
persuade us. 

This is the real problem of the earthly home. 
Order, obedience, thrift, must be maintained 
through th6 voluntary acquiescence of the children. 
The question is not, as an American educator has 
phrased it, ".I will conquer that child, no matter 
what it may cost him; but, I will help that child 
to conquer himself, no matter what it may cost 
me." The discipline of life is another name for 
the inevitable trouble that comes to a man when 
he gets the best of God for the time being. In 
the long-run, years, centuries, ages, man learns that 
he pays too heavy a price to have his own way. 
Chastened and instructed, he will habituate him- 
self to a life in harmony with divine purpose and 
goodness. He will love truth and right for their 
own sake. He will become good of his own voli- 
tion, and reap the peaceable fruits thereof. 

II. Our Relation to God is a Natural, not a 
Formal One. The theology of orthodoxy always 
has taken its terminology and analogies from the 
social and political complex of its day. Monarchy, 
aristocracy, feudalism, democracy, are all so many 
moulds into which has run the molten thought of 



40 Unofficial Christianity 

each age about God. The Almighty has been an 
absolute monarch and man has been an unruly sub- 
ject. The problem then becomes one of satisfying 
outraged majesty. Or, God has been a judge and 
man a culprit, and the problem then has resolved 
itself into the vindication of broken law. Or, God 
has been a creditor and man a debtor, and the 
problem then becomes one of paying a commercial 
obligation. In consequence, we have had theories 
of the atonement whereby Christ did gratuitous 
things for man which put him right with God. 
These theories are based upon ideas of God de- 
rived from passing human communal and govern- 
mental relationships. They were merely formal, 
forensic, artificial. A subject may remove from 
the kingdom and change his citizenship. A culprit 
may obtain a different venue and thus come under 
the jurisdiction of another judge. A debtor may 
go into bankruptcy and thus escape the payment of 
his debts. The point to be observed is this : in all 
these relationships, God and man have been 
brought together in ways which are not vital and 
inevitable and inescapable, but on the contrary are 
artificial, humanly arranged, and purely hypotheti- 
cal. The only relation between the two which can 
be true, is that which postulates a permanent, es- 
sential, and spiritual affinity. God was not in Jesus 
Christ as a king, or judge, or creditor, or any 
other political, judicial, or economic functionary. 



Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 41 

He was in Jesus Christ as a revealed Father. His 
dealings with us are domestic and paternal, not 
commercial, forensic, or governmental. Only the 
former relation preserves our sense of kindly inti- 
macy. With a father we may have communica- 
tion; from king, judge, creditor, we receive only 
excommunication. All arrangements made for 
atonement of guilt, smack of formality and arti- 
ficiality, as if we are being haled into an infinite 
court before an infinite bar. But if we are within 
the eternal precincts of God's home, then atone- 
ment becomes not a formal expression of law, but 
a natural expression of love. The only thing for 
which we human fathers wait in order to forgive, 
is a voluntary confession of guilt, and a mani- 
festation of contrition on the part of the one 
whose act has broken the domestic peace and har- 
mony. When such evidence of penitence appears, 
the ordinary father requires nothing more in order 
gladly to restore the offender to the place he had 
lost by virtue of his own act. Now, either we are 
all wrong, and should demand an innocent victim 
upon which to inflict the punishment belonging to 
the offender, before said offender may be for- 
given; or else, if we are right, the theology of 
orthodoxy with its substitutionary blood atonement 
is all wrong. If our relation with God is one of 
natural affinity, it would appear as though he 
needed nothing but our contrition, to cause his for- 



42 Unofficial Christianity 

giveness to occur. 

One final consideration leads us to believe in the 
natural rather than the formal relation. In all 
the various guises under which the latter theory 
is presented, it is not necessary for God to feel 
anything approaching affection in the entire trans- 
action. The king whose outraged majesty is satis- 
fied; the judge whose regard for violated law is 
justified; and the creditor whose bad debts are all 
paid, — maintain an attitude of cold and severe dis- 
approval of the offender, which, according to the 
analogies, need never change into anything even 
approximating affection, when "the great transac- 
tion's done." But the kernel of the Christian rev- 
elation of God, is love. Only that process of read- 
justment between man and God which is rooted in 
love, can be true. The monarchical, the juridical, 
the commercial, are strong in logic, but weak in 
love. They are therefore totally inadequate. But 
the domestic, or paternal is, by the nature of the 
case y a love relation. It comes closer, on the 
whole, to account satisfactorily for the way that 
Christ re-establishes harmony, than any other. 
Only when the father enters into the suffering of 
the son, and is cut to the quick by the same blade 
of transgression which has wounded the soul of 
the sinner, is the latter brought to see the true 
meaning of his sin. No forensic, artificial, or 
logically fabricated edifice of a coldly calculated 



Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 43 

substitutionary atonement can permanently chasten 
and regenerate the perverted mind of the world. 
God will still be excommunicant. Christ will still 
be the innocent victim of outraged divine dignity. 
The character of the Deity will still suffer by con- 
trast with the best of human parenthood. The 
human analogy of personal contact between father 
and son, and forgiveness on the condition of re* 
pentance, will annihilate that scheme of salvation 
which makes it impossible for God to do what he 
would like to do, unless Jesus does something first; 
and bases forgiveness, not upon personal contri- 
tion alone, but also upon the intellectual accept- 
ance by the sinner of a divine scrapegoat upon 
whom all the sins of all time have been heaped. 

No explanation of God is true which makes him 
less loving and merciful than the best of human 
fathers. No theory of God will work which ex- 
communicates him as spiritual renewer and re- 
deemer. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE USE AND MISUSE OF THE BIBLE 

IT ought not to be necessary to spend time prov- 
ing that the value of an instrument depends al- 
together upon the use which is made of it. A sul- 
phur match may kindle a fire which will warm back 
to life and service a freezing saint of God; or it 
may start a conflagration which will lay waste a 
city and burn to death scores of people. 

When we approach the Bible, the trouble with 
many is that they refuse to accept the premise 
that the book is a mere vehicle of truth. To them 
it is truth itself, and as such, like a potent charm, 
it simply needs to be applied in order to produce 
miraculous results. The difficulty with this posi- 
tion is that in order to hold it, one must be mole- 
blind to facts. Intellectual honesty inevitably will 
compel one to abandon this thesis. 

There are three assumptions which absolutely 
vitiate any defensible attitude toward the Scrip- 
tures, and which the religion of the twentieth cen- 
tury must destroy root and branch. 

I. The Bible is a Book of Equal Moral and 
44 



The Use and Misuse of the Bible 45 

Religious Authority Throughout. As a matter of 
fact, we are dealing with a literature which reflects 
the spiritual culture of many ages. There is no 
unity or homogeneity in it. There are contradic- 
tions, discrepancies, irreconcilables in it. Jephtha 
keeps a holy vow and slays his daughter. But a 
prophet, centuries later, declares that a man "shall 
not give the fruit of his body for the sin of his 
soul," and that what God desires is justice, mercy 
and a humble demeanor before him. Jacob and 
David, exiled from home, are convinced that they 
are leaving God behind them as well, and going 
out to lands ruled by other deities. But a Psalmist 
asks the rhetorical question, " Whither shall I go 
from thy spirit and whither shall I flee from thy 
presence ?" An ancient law declared that God 
"visited the sins of the Fathers upon the children 
unto the third and fourth generation." But 
a later Hebrew teacher flatly contradicted 
this when he asserted, "The soul that 
sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not 
bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall 
the father bear the iniquity of the son." The Jew- 
ish historian records that when David took a 
census of the people, he was tempted of God; a 
later chronicler, in the interest of orthodox theol- 
ogy, modifies this by making Satan, not the deity, 
the tempter. The wholesale murders of Jehu, in 
ridding the earth of the dynasty of Omri, were 



46 Unofficial Christianity 

approved by God, according to the writer of 
Kings; but later prophets unsparingly denounced 
Jehu, and attributed the current national disasters 
to God's judgment because of those crimes. In 
the earliest times, God was worshiped under dif- 
ferent names at many local shrines ; then worship 
was centralized at Jerusalem, and shrine worship 
was forbidden; finally Jesus announced that 
"neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall 
ye worship the father," thus making religion 
ubiquitous. 

Accordingly, there are very different levels of 
ethical and religious ideas in Scripture. Its litera- 
ture ranges from ruthless injunctions of indis- 
criminate slaughter of enemies, to God-like man- 
dates to love and forgive one's foes. Guilty and 
innocent are involved in punishment. Slavery, 
concubinage, drunkenness, blood revenge, lust, and 
murder not only find place in its pages, but if not 
tacitly defended, are only mildly rebuked. Com- 
pare with these the noblest utterances of the great 
prophets and Jesus, touching cleanness of heart, 
fidelity, chastity, forgiveness, and magnanimity, 
and it will be perceived how utterly impossible it 
is to defend the premise that the Bible is of equal 
moral and spiritual value and authority through- 
out. 

II. A Book, All Parts of which Apply to Us. 
This second position of those who misuse the 



The Use and Misuse of the Bible 47 

Bible is equally demoralizing. As a matter of 
fact, each man who put pen to parchment wrote 
with an absorbing interest in the events of his 
own day and people. There is no shadow of 
justification in the belief that they expected eternity 
to be upon their productions. Much of what they 
discussed had no existence beyond the hour in 
which these men lived. But the allegorizing and 
"proof-text" habits of grubbing, sophomoric in- 
terpreters, have vitiated sound Biblical truth, lo, 
these many years. Out of the arsenal of Scripture, 
men have brought clumsy, archaic, and utterly 
useless weapons for the slaughter of the hosts of 
righteousness, or the defense of citadels of im- 
morality. Polygamy has been approved because 
Abraham and David divided their connubial affec- 
tions among several wives. Witches were burned 
in New England and authority therefore was 
drawn from the impregnable rock of Scripture, 
which declares, "Suffer not a witch to live." Negro 
slavery based its claim upon the curse of God pro- 
nounced upon Ham. The moderate drinker re- 
fers you convincingly to Paul's kindly suggestion 
to Timothy that he "take a little wine for his 
stomach's sake." The militarist knows that he is 
Christian because the Master said, "I came not to 
send peace but a sword." And the pacifist retorts 
that he is equally Christian because of the Lord's 
injunction to turn the other cheek when smitten. 



48 Unofficial Christianity 

Tyrants always have attempted to crush move- 
ments for freedom by quoting Paul's word, "Let 
every soul be in subjection unto the higher powers, 
for the powers that be are ordained of God", and 
the same great Apostle is made sponsor for the 
theory of the subordination of woman, because he 
once said, "the husband is the head of the wife". 

If the Bible ever anywhere claimed for itself 
that it applied with equal validity to all ages and 
social conditions, there might be some reason for 
the misuse to which it has been put. But it makes 
no such claim. It is not like one of those slot 
machines into which a coin may be slipped and 
from which a card may be extracted, telling one 
his fortune, giving him his weight, and in general 
answering the dearest question of his heart. On 
the contrary, every Bible verse must be read in 
the light of its context, the stage of religious de- 
velopment reached at the time it was written ; the 
national hope, glory, fear, or danger which in- 
spired the author; the temperamental prejudices 
which possessed him; and the mental and moral 
limitations under which he labored. It is probable 
that not one word in a thousand in the Old Testa- 
ment and scarcely a quarter of the New Testa- 
ment were penned with the remotest idea that 
future generations would ever appeal to them as 
authoritative. 

III. A Book which Contains All of God's 



The Use and Misuse of the Bible 49 

Revelation. Nothing really has damaged the 
Bible more than this baseless assumption. It has 
caused the long and bootless and quite disgraceful 
war with science. It has alienated multitudes of 
reverent, truth-loving people from it because it 
has seemed to arrogate to itself unwarranted 
omniscience. It has retarded the growth of an 
intelligent ministry by casting suspicion upon 
scholarship. It has perpetuated that baneful dis- 
tinction between the sacred and the secular. It 
has put a time-limit upon the revelatory powers of 
the Almighty. It has made a literature of relig- 
ious feeling into an official and infallible textbook 
on biology, geology, anthropology, sociology and 
many other cognate sciences. It has imprisoned 
the free spirit of the Christian religion within the 
lids of the Bible and has refused to permit it to 
step one foot outside. It has erected a dogma of 
inspiration which has excommunicated from re- 
ligious literature much of genuine spiritual value. 
It is utterly indefensible on any and every ground. 
Even the Psalmist recognized that the Scriptures 
did not contain all the truth about God. a The 
heavens declare the glory of God. . . . Whither 
shall I go from thy spirit, and whither shall I flee 
from thy presence?" The flower in the crannied 
wall, the fossil in the buried rock, the tidal wave 
of racial immigration, and the faith in the heart 
of a child, all reveal God. The Almighty was not 



50 Unofficial Christianity 

struck dumb when the canon of the New Testa- 
ment was closed. Paul enjoyed the confidence of 
God no more than many another later Christian 
Apostle. The greatest prophecy of the book it- 
self is that "when the Spirit of Truth is come, he 
shall guide you into all truth." The splendid ex- 
periences which God has vouchsafed to hi§, 
prophets and chosen people are to be enriched and 
amplified by what his universe of mind and mat- 
ter reveals to-day. 

In the right use of the Bible there must be the 
exercise of: 

i. Selection. There is more in the Bible than 
we need. Only the antiquarian, theologian, stu- 
dent of comparative religions, literary critic and 
preacher have use for the Bible from cover to 
cover. As a matter of fact, we have a 
little Bible within the big Bible. Instinc- 
tively we select and discriminate in our 
reading of the Book. We prefer John to 
Judges, Luke to Chronicles, Psalms to Esther, and 
Isaiah to Numbers. Thus we really are doing 
what the old ecumenical councils did : we are mak- 
ing for ourselves the canon of Scriptures. This 
habit is a sound one. It arises from the instinct 
that the measure of the Bible^s value for us is its 
power to unlock the mind, warm the heart, quicken 
the conscience, and train the will. Not the canon- 
icity of a book makes it meaningful, but its content. 



The Use and Misuse of the Bible 51 

The question is not who made it for me, but what 
does it make out of me? Not "was somebody 
else inspired who wrote it?" but, "am I inspired 
when I read it?" Answering these questions hon- 
estly, we are led to seek our spiritual nourishment 
here and there within the Book, not impartially 
everywhere from cover to cover. 

2. Reason. The time has passed when we 
are afraid to "prove all things" that we may "hold 
fast that which is good." Submitting truth to the 
test of reason will only establish the truth, for 
truth is reasonable. We have "a reasonable faith 
and a reasonable service." The evidence of 
reasonableness is the total affirmative response of 
the entire man. Does a certain belief awaken the 
favorable answer of thought and feeling and in- 
tuition and will, all blended and merged? Does 
it mobilize all the forces of personality? Does it 
evoke the assent of the deepest voice within? If 
it does, it is a reasonable belief. But if there still 
be doubt, the questioned belief may be put to the 
test of value-producing power. A reasonable eco- 
nomics is one which is of value to civil govern- 
ment; a reasonable therapeutics is one which will 
cure the sick; a reasonable educational system is 
one which really educates; and a reasonable re- 
ligion is one which produces character. Reason is 
the handmaid of faith, not its assassin. It is 
reasonable for a man to believe in an orderly uni- 



52 Unofficial Christianity 

verse, a benevolent Deity, a continuance of per- 
sonality after death, an optimistic view of life, 
the love of his mother and the fidelity of his child. 
The broadest, fairest, best-tested view of exist- 
ence will verify these affirmations. The deepest 
and best within him assents to these proposals ; and 
living by virtue of their grace makes for a co- 
herent and value-full universe. 

When we approach the Bible, we do so as ra- 
tional beings. Much within its pages neither 
evokes the total favorable response of personality, 
nor, tested by experience, makes for life value. 
Such parts, a reasonable faith would reject. But 
much of it is as u deep calling unto deep." It 
awakens the dormant spirit of man, meets his 
moral and spiritual needs, creates character when 
given free course in him, and becomes for him a 
reasonable setting-forth of divine truth. The 
authority of the Bible resides only in such por- 
tions as call forth this total affirmative response of 
man's personality. A mere ipse dixit may compel 
obedience, but it will not carry conviction, unless 
its reasonableness is recognized. 

The fact of the matter is that the authority of 
truth rests upon the capacity of man to assimilate 
it. The Bible has been master of men because it 
has said so many things which man's soul has been 
fitted to appropriate. There has been no coercion 
in the real process of achieving supremacy. The 



The Use and Misuse of the Bible 53 

authority of the Bible does not depend upon any 
claims to infallibility, upon any dogma of inspira- 
tion. Rather it rests upon the fact that "man is 
incurably religious", and setting forth the things of 
religion, it awakens the spontaneous "amen" in 
the soul of man. When God's will is written upon 
the pages of a book, it finds itself duplicated upon 
the tables of men's hearts, and in this fact resides 
its authority. "Behold, the days come, saith the 
Lord, when I will put my law in their inward parts, 
and in their hearts will I write it." If there were 
no counterpart of the divine within us, to react to 
the divine without us, the sound of the latter would 
be as clanging brass and tinkling cymbals ! 

3. A Christian Spirit. A chain may be no 
stronger than its weakest link; but the Bible is as 
strong as its strongest part. Arid that part is the 
Christian part. The presence of Christ in the 
Bible is the supreme fact. It might be said to be 
the only important fact. Every inconsistency 
should be interpreted by the rule of the higher, 
not lower, revelation; every contradiction should 
be resolved in the light of the Christian, not pre- 
Christian or non-Christian ideal. Much in the Old 
Testament is of value, even though it is not dis- 
tinctly in accord with the highest ethical standards, 
because it provides a strong background from 
which the great picture of the religion of the spirit 
in Jesus Christ stands forth in heroic proportions. 



54 Unofficial Christianity 

It gives us an insight into the habits of mind of 
the forbears of our Christian faith, and supplies 
us with the grace of sympathy. It indicates the 
continuity of that growth of religious life which 
the Jews, in common with all other races, shared. 
It thus commends the whole process of develop- 
ment in spiritual culture as something more than 
national, and links the inner life of many peoples 
together. 

But to-day, we are not under law, but grace. 
Christ, not Moses, is the genius of the Bible. It 
is his spirit which is to be our criterion and none 
other. We may gain a vivid total impression of 
Jesus. About the salient points in his character 
we may agree. We may come to view life "under 
the Christ aspect." When we have done all this, 
let that Christ ideal govern our Scriptural in- 
terpretation, correcting all which is both immature 
and unworthy. "If Paul had been told that he 
would be talked of as of equal authority with the 
Lord, he would have burned his letters," pun- 
gently remarks the late Professor Clarke. And 
Paul would be anathema in his own eyes, were he 
asked to substitute, for twentieth century Amer- 
ica, his own strongly marked Jewish interpreta- 
tion of Jesus. 

We may rest secure, then, upon the hidden and 
enduring spiritual foundations of Scripture. We 
know what God has revealed, because God has 



The Use and Misuse of the Bible 55 

gifted us with the faculty whereby we recognize 
it. We may leave the theme, using the noble 
words of Sabatier: 

"It is not because the Christian religion is in 
the Bible that it is true. It is because it is in it- 
self true that when you find it in the Bible you say 
that the Bible teaches the truth." 



CHAPTER V 

THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL 

ONE of the most sublime and unruffled con- 
fidences of Jesus was that goodness could not 
only take care of itself, but at the same time make 
more goodness. The leaven might lose its iden- 
tity, but in the process it vitalized the dead dough. 
The seed might be disintegrated in the soil, but 
from it came a whole tree full of more seeds. The 
talent might disappear in trade, but from the 
transaction there would result two, five, or ten 
more talents. The strong man fully armed can 
not only keep his own goods in safety, but he 
can, by defeating the marauder, make the safety 
of the goods of the public more sure. The light 
on the lampstand not only shines itself, but it 
makes dark corners bright; the salt not only has 
savor in itself, but it preserves that with which it 
comes in contact. In a multitude of ways Jesus 
illustrates this truth: that goodness can not only 
keep itself intact, but can, by contagion, make its 
environing envelop good as well. Bushnell uses 
a quaint phrase to express this truth. "The church 

56 



The World, the Flesh and the Devil 57 

is to possess the world by the outpopulating power 
of the Christian stock." There is virtue enough 
in Christian people not only to preserve them from 
being spoiled from contact with evil, but also, and 
more, to make them reproduce goodness by con- 
tagion. 

But in many quarters and for many generations 
a contrary view has prevailed. Goodness' chief 
business was to quarantine itself against the devil- 
ishness of the world. The church was an ark of 
safety, a city of refuge, a strong fortress of de- 
fense against the spiritual hosts of wickedness. 
Thus the church became the official patron and 
custodian of goodness, which was to be preserved 
only by keeping its skirts clear of the contaminat- 
ing influence of evil. 

On the other hand, the viewpoint of Jesus 
would indicate that goodness is a therapeutic to be 
applied to social disease, an antiseptic to arrest 
moral putrefaction, a prophylactic to destroy the 
bacteria of sin, a leaven to vitalize the lump of so- 
ciety, a healthy atmosphere breathing through the 
miasma of the world, a spiritual free trade, pene- 
trating every portion of the habitable globe. The 
one absolutely essential factor in the relation be- 
tween goodness and evil, is unhindered inter- 
course between the two. Goodness is for the pur- 
pose of world sanitation. It is to establish a moral 
hygiene. It is to save the world by becoming a 



58 Unofficial Christianity 

part of it. 

Two considerations are before us. 

I. The True Alignment. What this is has 
been hinted already. Not a concrete unified, spir- 
itually superior organization known as the 
"church", versus an unregenerate, heterogeneous 
and immoral mass outside, known as the "world". 
Rather it is the spirit of love and helpfulness 
under the direction of Christ, versus the spirit of 
hate and selfishness in despite of Christ. The 
"world", as has been aptly observed, is "society 
organized apart from God". There are not two 
hemispheres, one of which is inhabited by good 
and is called "the church", and the other of which 
is inhabited by evil and is called "the world". 
George Bernard Shaw, in a preface to one of his 
plays, pungently has put the case. "The first com- 
mon mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists 
of a great mass of religious people, and a few 
eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of 
worldly people and a small percentage of persons 
deeply interested in religion and concerned about 
their own souls and other people's. We pass our 
lives among people who, whatever creeds they may 
repeat, and in whatever temples they may avouch 
their respectability and wear their Sunday clothes, 
have robust consciences, and hunger and thirst, 
not after righteousness, but for rich feeding and 
comfort and social position and attractive mates 



The World, the Flesh and the Devil 59 

and ease and respect and consideration; in short 
for love and money." 

It is to be feared that Shaw has only too justly 
caricatured the church here. But he has done us 
this service, that he cynically has called our atten- 
tion to the fact that the true alignment is not be- 
tween an organization known as u the church" and 
all outside, known popularly as u the world, the 
flesh and the devil". Rather, let it be repeated 
the struggle is ever between the incarnate spirit 
of love and service under the direction of Christ, 
wherever manifest; and the incarnate spirit of 
hate and selfishness in despite of Christ, wherever 
manifest. In the words of Graham Taylor: 
"The world can no longer be considered as a 
sphere of human life separate from or antagonis- 
tic to the church. Too much religion has gotten 
out of the church into the world to allow us to 
think of all the good being in the church, and the 
world as being nothing but evil." 

The religion of the twentieth century will in- 
sist, as never before, that he who is not against 
Christ is for him; and that by a man's fruits shall 
he be known. On the other hand, it will have 
stern words for those who cry "We be Abraham's 
seed", and do not the works of Abraham, resting 
their hope upon the dead merits of a spiritual pedi- 
gree, rather than upon the quick virtue of a 
righteous performance. The spirit of "the world" 



6o Unofficial Christianity 

must be exorcised from the church, and the spirit 
of the Christ must be recognized in the world, be- 
fore the Kingdom in its right proportions can be 
defined. For the Kingdom is greater than the 
church, and its citizens are found without the 
church. Either the church must expand and take 
in the Kingdom, or the Kingdom will come into its 
own without the church. If there are all too many 
who cry "Lord, Lord," and do not the works of 
their Father, there are a growing host who, with- 
out spiritual banner, sign or symbol, practise the 
deeds of Christ. Of whom it may once again be 
said, "They are not far from the Kingdom of 
Heaven." 

After the true alignment, comes: 

II. The True Task. Goodness is inherently 
stronger than evil. There is in it the germ of a 
spiritual contagion. It is more than the posses- 
sion of a defensive armor. It is more than having 
a stoutness and robustness of character sufficient 
to withstand malign forces. Goodness has re- 
productive as well as self-defensive powers. It is 
dynamic, not static. It is not a monk; it is a cru- 
sader. Confronted with specific evil, goodness 
alike preserves itself and destroys its foe by con- 
tact with the world, not by withdrawal from it. 
Almost it might be said that the only hope for im- 
proving the health of goodness, is its stern struggle 
with evil. 



The World, the Flesh and the Devil 61 

The practical way in which the religion of the 
twentieth century is going to deal with evil is not 
far to seek. There are some forms of human 
activity which, by common consent, are perceived 
to have such a preponderating weight of un- 
adulterated evil, that, like a thoroughly rotten 
fruit, there is no hope to save them. Enlightened 
sentiment, under moral tutelage, has relegated 
them to the scrapheap. Such are legalized prosti- 
tution, state-protected liquor traffic, state-main- 
tained lotteries, chattel slavery, and piracy 
on the high seas. But other forms of 
activity are evil in their operation only 
because a certain modicum of taint or poison 
inheres in them. Through abuse of the principle 
of moderation or through association with forces 
themselves irredeemable, these activities which are 
not intrinsically demoralizing, have become so- 
cially indefensible. Obviously the task of Chris- 
tianity is to strain off the virus, leaving the sound 
body. It is common to say that certain amuse- 
ments "leave a bad taste in your mouth." Walt 
Mason, the preacher with the biggest American 
audience, has put it thus : 

"And every time you see a play 
And read a book that makes a jest 

Of love or home, you throw away 
Some part of you that is the best." 



62 Unofficial Christianity 

Some forms of business have been so dragged 
in the mire that a self-respecting man finds it hard 
to engage in them. Among the ancients, politics 
used to be an honorable profession, but "profes- 
sional politician" to-day carries with it an un- 
coveted stigma. The promoting of amusement 
parks, seaside resorts, race-tracks and theatres has 
resulted often in hoodlumism, gambling, and gen- 
eral looseness of living. A very large number of 
social activities are in the main innocuous, but 
handled improperly they become demoralized and 
demoralizing. The good in them really more than 
counterbalances the evil. Yet because the vicious 
is present, they become a social menace. 

There are two ways in which decent, clean- 
minded, and high-idealed people treat these so- 
called "questionable" things. One class, regard- 
ing them as hopelessly irredeemable, taboos them 
in toto. With a quite characteristic interpretation 
of Scripture to suit their own views, they uphold 
their action by the Pauline words, "touch not, 
taste not, handle not." They believe that the 
world will never be safe for righteousness until 
these moot forms of diversion are relegated to 
the limbo of Satan, where by nature they belong. 
This class of people may not be numerically 
strong, but in the counsels of the theology of or- 
thodoxy they are imposingly influential. The 
other class will avow frankly that they have a lik- 



The World, the Flesh and the Devil 63 

ing for the "best" of these tabood amusements. 
They patronize the movies with wise discrimina- 
tion; they attend their children to their school 
dances ; they spend an evening with cards now and 
then in the company of friends. The difference 
between these two attitudes of mind is more than 
a superficial one. It strikes to the very root of 
Christian faith. It is the difference between re- 
nouncing the world and redeeming it, between dis- 
carding the dough and leavening it, between the 
asceticism of the monk and the evangelism of 
Christ. The former view confesses the impotency 
of Christianity to transform society; the latter 
view holds that Christianity is meant to substitute 
good for evil by fearless contact, the one with the 
other. In every community there is needed an as- 
sociation of friends of normal, wholesome life, 
who shall let it be known that they will vigorously 
and sympathetically support all forms of amuse- 
ment which appeal to the fine, true, healthy manly 
and womanly qualities in people; which promote 
sane, sound and essentially optimistic attitudes to- 
ward life; which are not socially disruptive, debas- 
ing or demoralizing. The proprietors and pro- 
moters of all such forms of diversion will be quick 
to note the increased patronage when the bill of 
fare which they offer is not only palatable, but 
wholesome. 

The secret of safety is not separation, but con- 



64 Unofficial Christianity 

secration. The religion of the twentieth century 
will hold as one of its cardinal principles, that the 
possession of a passion for God will make men not 
only immune from evil, but creative of good. To 
be in the world but not of it, is the business of 
Christ's followers. In the words of the late Malt- 
bie Babcock, "We cannot know or enjoy or love 
the world too much, if God's will controls us. . . . 
Worldliness is not the love of the world, but 
slavishness to it." 



CHAPTER VI 

TIMES, SACRAMENTS AND THE MAN 

PERHAPS the most fascinating study for the 
student of Christian origins, is that which per- 
tains to those venerable and well-established in- 
stitutions known as Sabbath observance, baptism, 
and the Lord's Supper. Because when the student 
has penetrated a little below the surface in his 
investigations, he will discover that the roots of 
these customs run down into pre-Christian pagan- 
ism. It will appear to him, therefore, that what 
Christianity has done with them, has been to 
adapt them to Christian thought, reinterpret them 
in the light of Christian ideals, and reinvest them 
with truer spiritual meaning. The Graeco-Roman 
world possessed its altars, temples, festival days, 
mystic rites and sacerdotal ceremonies. And when 
the Christian dynamic moved paganism from its 
foundation, it did not annihilate so much as it as- 
similated. It took the days and places and cults 
and gave them different content and significance. 

Jesus himself formally established neither the 
Sabbath nor the sacraments. The former was a 

65 



66 Unofficial Christianity 

Jewish religious festival, firmly established in the 
nation through contact with Babylonian heathen- 
dom. The latter were developed out of Greek 
and Jewish rites. Early Christian usage trans- 
ferred the sanctity from Saturday, the Jewish 
Sabbath, to Sunday, the Christian day com- 
memorative of the resurrection. As such it has 
continued to be regarded with especial favor and 
partiality. Jesus did not baptize nor did he in- 
clude that function in the first and greatest com- 
mission which He gave to His followers when He 
told them to "preach, saying, 'The Kingdom of 
God is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, 
cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.' " No sub- 
sequent commission carries the unquestioned tex- 
tual authenticity that this does, nor in the slightest 
degree weakens nor invalidates the force of these 
injunctions. The last and popularly called "great 
commission" recorded in the two closing verses of 
Matthew's gospel quite justly is open to the im- 
putation of pseudonymity, since the disciples, in 
their earliest labors, followed a policy directly con- 
tradictory to that of "evangelizing all nations" 
and using the Trinitarian formula in baptism. This 
fact, that the primitive church never dreamed of 
world-wide missionary effort, and initiated its con- 
verts through the mystic use of the name of Jesus 
Christ, and not that of the Trinity, militates finally 
against the genuineness of the Matthew commis- 



Times, Sacraments and the Man 67 

sion. It is not for one moment to be believed 
that had the eleven really received this solemn 
and final charge, they would have so totally ig- 
nored it as the record in Acts indicates they did. 
It is common knowledge that, far from consider- 
ing the Greek world as equally heir of the gospel, 
all of the disciples up to Paul strenuously fought 
the propaganda of "proselyting all nations," re- 
garding Jesus as a Jewish Messiah, and the prom- 
ises of the Kingdom limited to the Hebrew race. 
And touching the baptismal formula, the thought 
was always Christocentric, as the reiterated 
phrase "baptize into the name of Jesus Christ" 
indicates. 

There is likewise strong critical evidence that 
when Jesus partook of the final passover with his 
disciples, and added the touching symbol of the 
bread and the wine, he was not instituting a new 
sacrament for perpetual observance. Rather did 
he wish that whenever his friends lifted the 
broken bread and the red wine to their lips, they 
should lovingly think of him. "This do in re- 
membrance of me. ... As oft as ye do this, ye 
do show forth [i. e. testify to] the Lord's death 
till he come." To the pious Jew, every meal was 
sacramental, for there in spirit Jehovah met with 
him, and Jesus desired his disciples symbolically 
to feast with him in like manner. The primitive 
church made the Eucharist a part of the common 



68 Unofficial Christianity 

meal and never formally and officially set it aside 
by a ritual or sacramental name. 

The derivation of these three Christian insti- 
tutions — the so-called "Sabbath," the rite of bap- 
tism and the communion of the Lord's Supper — 
has been dwelt upon at length for this purpose, to 
point out how free the apostolic church was in 
adapting old customs to present needs. The su- 
preme demand was for vehicles of thought and 
feeling adequate to convey spiritual truth. The 
Sabbath, baptism and the Supper were to be trans- 
parent media, through which the grace of God 
was to shine upon his children. If, in the chang- 
ing circumstances of time and place, these media 
became inadequate to perform that function, it 
certainly would be the part of common sense to 
modify them until they again could accomplish the 
task for which they were devised. The house in 
which one lives is the same house the year round. 
But in summer it answers the purpose of keeping 
one cool; in winter it answers the opposite pur- 
pose of keeping one warm. Once, men scratched 
the ground with a pointed stick; now they tear it 
deep with a plow. Their object is the same in 
both cases. Thus in the matter of the institutions 
and sacraments of Christian faith, the great prin- 
ciple is that of accommodation, making the means 
adequate and efficient to produce the end. 

Take the Sabbath first. The classic and all- 



Times, Sacraments and the Man 69 

sufficient word of Jesus is "the Sabbath was made 
for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the 
Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath." A cor- 
rect understanding of the latter phrase will throw 
much light on the whole question. Jesus spoke in 
Aramaic, the popular dialect of the Jews. And in 
this tongue, the expression "son of" commonly 
meant a single, individual member of a generic 
group of things. Thus the above-quoted phrase 
may well mean, "each man is Lord of the Sab- 
bath/' — a quite natural conclusion from the dec- 
laration that "the Sabbath was made for man." 
The kernel, therefore, of this logion of Jesus 
about the Sabbath, is that the day, as an institu- 
tion, is a means to an end. The complete welfare 
of man is that end. If the Sabbath, as an ob- 
served institution, truly ministers to the all-round 
good of man, it should be preserved. If it does 
not, it must be modified or abandoned. Now our 
trouble to-day is this: we do not so much abuse 
the Sabbath as we abuse man. We place a low, 
cheap, and unworthy value upon him, and then 
modify all our Sabbath usages to meet this new 
demand, justifying our procedure by the declara- 
tion that we are thus making man "lord of the 
Sabbath." But we grossly slander man when we 
map out his regeneration by means of a program 
of more amusement, warmer clothes, better food 
and greater leisure, — and stop there. When we 



70 Unofficial Christianity 

do this, it is inevitable that "Sabbatarianism" ap- 
pears as a check in our effort to reform men in 
this material way. So we exultantly quote Jesus' 
words about "the Sabbath being made for man," 
and sweep aside all the conventions as being prud- 
ish, "Puritanical" and out of date. It would be 
well for us tq remember that we never shall 
do justice either to God or man, until we esti- 
mate man at his highest value. So long as we take 
materialistic and "pleasure" views of life, and 
try to fit man, the "noblest work. of God," into 
such a petty scheme, just so long shall we degrade 
man and misunderstand God's purpose for him. 
What are life's supremest values? Fun, food, 
money, might? If we are after these, we shall 
have no use at all for any kind of an institution 
called the "Sabbath." But if honor, truth, sym- 
pathy, love really make men, then the influences 
of Sunday as a day apart from other days are 
needful in his life. If we think of man as Christ 
thought of him, we shall try to conserve in him 
those traits which mark him as different from the 
animals. If the Sabbath laws help to do this, we 
shall keep them; if they do not, we shall discard 
them. This cuts both deep and wide. If Sab- 
batarianism works for the physical, mental, moral, 
social, and spiritual uplift of the modern man, the 
religion of the twentieth century endorses it. But 
there can be no inflexible rule for all. What 



Times, Sacraments and the Man 71 

fits one community may not fit another. Men who 
rot in slums, who feed machines, who are bound 
to the stupifying treadmill of monotonous manual 
toil, need a kind of rejuvenation and revitalizing 
on Sunday that most others do not. "Sabbatarian- 
ism," as commonly understood, would be a mill- 
stone about the neck of the industrial classes. To 
run everybody through the same mould of Sabbath 
legislation would be as stupid, disastrous, and 
wicked as it would be to establish a national com- 
pulsory bill of fare, irrespective of the ages, tem- 
peraments, appetites and physical peculiarities of 
the one hundred and more million people of this 
country. We should eat food to sustain life, and 
we should observe Sunday for the same reason. 
When we take an eternally worthwhile view of 
life, we shall know how to nourish ourselves on 
Sunday as well as on every other day. 

In like manner, we shall regard the sacraments 
as binding and indispensable, only as they effectu- 
ally teach certain great and deathless truths to 
heart and mind. Baptism is in itself nothing. 
Jesus never made it a means of salvation. It may 
have absolutely no illuminating or instructing 
power for a not inconsiderable number of people 
who are so constituted as not to need the help 
of symbol or object-lesson in order to assimilate 
truth. In either form, immersion or sprinkling, 
the baptismal formula impresses the twofold truth 



72 Unofficial Christianity 

of a cleansed past and a spirit-filled future. "As 
in a figure" the recipient of the rite sees his sins 
washed away and is assured of the incoming grace 
of God. To many, this sacrament is truly a 
"means of grace." The reality of God's forgive- 
ness and re-enforcing power becomes vital and 
concrete through the act of immersion or sprink- 
ling. But to many others it adds nothing to the 
experience which is already theirs. They have 
felt the cleansing effect of God's love; they are 
convinced that God is in them, "the hope of 
glory." The rite of baptism, therefore, neither 
adds to the solemn joy of an experienced new 
birth, nor detracts from it. To the sacrament 
they passively submit, as a conventional formula. 
Others there are, and they are a growing num- 
ber, who actually resent the imputation that any 
form, symbol, or sacrament is needed when they 
have come to realize that they are God's children 
and the recipients of his favor. 

The question, therefore, becomes an insistent 
one: in view of the variety of honestly differing 
opinion, and bearing in mind the original failure 
of Jesus to inaugurate this rite and the impossi- 
bility of insisting upon this symbol as an indispen- 
sable means of salvation, can the religion of the 
twentieth century continue to make baptism a uni- 
versal and compulsory method of initiation into 
the realm of God? If what has been above con- 



Times, Sacraments and the Man 73 

tended is true, then we may be confident that if 
and when men come to experience vitally the 
cleansing power of God's love and f orgivness, and 
the quickening effect of his continued presence 
within their hearts, — the twofold truth which is 
symbolized by the rite of baptism, — they will be 
found more and more generally discarding the 
sacrament while exalting the truth. 

The same line of argument holds for the sacra- 
ment of the Supper, with this difference. Whereas 
it must inevitably fall into disuse as a mystic 
means whereby God's grace is conferred upon 
the believer, it will persist and grow in meaning 
as a memorial or fellowship meal. Baptism is an 
act quite foreign to our normal living, but men will 
continue to break bread and take the cup so long 
as life shall last. It is therefore quite possible 
to stress the sacrament of the Supper, as it is not 
possible to exalt that of baptism. Only in doing 
the former, the twentieth century religion, mind- 
ful of the symbolic nature of the rite, will more 
and more insist that the whole occasion be one in 
which the same kind of spiritual fellowship with 
Christ be recognized, as men recognize with one 
another when they eat and drink in love and help- 
fulness. As an essential, indispensable, and offi- 
cially established means of salvation, the Supper 
never can hold the hearts and minds of modern 
men. As a touching reminder and symbol of 



74 Unofficial Christianity 

that larger fellowship of men with men, and men 
with God, it will continue to make its appeal. 

The world is hungry, not for signs and symbols, 
but for truth and reality. We are to be "trans- 
formed by the renewing of our minds, that we 
may prove what is the good and acceptable and 
perfect will of God" ; we are to bring it to pass 
that "Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith . . . 
that we may be filled with all the fulness of God." 
Do the sacraments efficiently minister to this end? 
If they do, we shall hold them; if they do not, they 
must go. 



CHAPTER VII 

JUST BEING GOOD 

IT is significant that when Jesus desired to 
show the real connection between religion and 
morals, he quoted an Old Testament prophet. He 
was being criticized harshly for the infraction of 
the caste system which decreed that pious relig- 
ionists should not break bread at the same table 
with the non-conformists and unorthodox. In re- 
ply to his detractors, Jesus called their attention 
to the fact that they did not know what religion 
in its essence was, if they could pursue such prac- 
tices. Fellowship, kindly consideration and com- 
radeship are of infinitely more worth than ritual 
and sacrament. Out of the mouth of their own 
revered prophet would he confute them. "Go," 
said he, "and get truly acquainted with the mean- 
ing of this word — *I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' " 
Not from the prophets had the Pharisees 
drawn their sanction for the violent and unnatural 
divorcing of morals from worship. From Elijah 
even unto Malachi the burden of the prophetic 
message was the abhorrence of Almighty God for 

75 



y6 Unofficial Christianity 

any ritual that was not productive of justice, 
mercy, and truth. In this respect, Jesus simply 
reiterated with a supreme emphasis the sermon 
messages of these ancient preachers of social 
righteousness. In the mind of Jesus, religion and 
morality were absolutely inseparable. They were 
like the tree and the fruit which it bears ; like the 
thought and the word which springs to the lips 
to express it; like the music in the heart of the 
composer and the song which he sings for the 
world; like the mother's love and the tender care 
which that love inspires. Devotion, worship, 
love, loyalty, faith, — these are the ingredients of a 
religion that is imperishable. Justice, mercy, ser- 
vice, goodness, — these are the moral fruits of 
such a religion. From the days of the prophets 
even until now religion has been done to death 
in the house of its friends, who have not hesitated 
to recommend, by precept and example, a course 
of life based upon cultus, ritual, and ceremony 
alone. As a result there has been a vast deal of 
altogether superfluous sneering at "mere moral- 
ity" on the part of those professing to be "re- 
ligious." Youth have been warned solemnly that 
"morality alone cannot inherit the Kingdom of 
God." Blameless characters outside the church 
have been held up as fearful examples of the un- 
worthy end of non-Christians. To such an ex- 
treme has this been carried that literature has 



Just Being Good 77 

freely caricatured the man of religious pretensions 
devoid of moral actions, and it has besmirched the 
fair name of morality by calling such a man 
"moral" when as a matter of fact he was neither 
religious nor moral. 

Hence there has arisen the startlingly unchris- 
tian assumption, that good as a man may be, if 
he is not religious there is something the matter 
with him. By a curious perverseness of reason- 
ing it has been believed that an impeccable char- 
acter is something to be rather ashamed of if its 
possessor can not show a card of membership in 
an evangelical church. 

Leaving for the time being all further discus- 
sion of the relation between religion and ethics, 
let us ask this question: "Who is the good man?" 
If we are able to answer this query, it will be 
easier to show how morals are grounded in faith. 
Nothing will throw more light upon this matter 
than the temper and attitude of Jesus. Whatever 
else he was, he was supremely good. He demon- 
strated this goodness, for one thing, by: 

I. Altruistic Attentiveness. He was sensitive 
to a vaster world than his fellows were. The 
circle of his interests included infinite dimensions. 
His relation to life was wide-eyed and far-sighted. 
He answered a cosmic, not a local appeal. In it 
all, his position was uprightly and downrightly 
unselfish. We absolve him from any and every 



78 Unofficial Christianity 

mercenary end. His awareness of the universe 
was not that he might make the universe serve 
his ambitions. His one injunction, "love thy 
neighbor as thyself," when interpreted by his life, 
summed up this characteristic of disinterested vis- 
ion. For necessity, not propinquity, is the con- 
dition of "neighborness." To know this need, 
wherever around the world it may be, and to 
know it to alleviate it, is altruistic attentiveness, 
the first requisite of goodness. 

This, it should be noted, is exactly opposed to 
the motive and conduct of the Caesars, Napo- 
leons, and Kaisers. Their view, to be sure, is 
world-wide. Their circle of interests takes in all 
nations. They concern themselves with the af- 
fairs of mankind. They are aware of the gigantic 
proportions of human relations, and project their 
plans upon great canvases. But the sole aim 
and end of their prodigious adventures, is egotistic, 
not altruistic. Personal glory and aggrandize- 
ment is the sum of their efforts. The world is to 
be their football, with the goal posts directly 
ahead, and their toe at the leather. They scorn 
small views, but think in world terms only to loot 
the world. 

Others there be who, eschewing narrow out- 
looks on life, plan to accomplish heroic things for 
a small and select circle of frienjds. These men 
are sometimes called patriots, because they aim to 



Just Being Good 79 

exalt their country and their countrymen. But in 
doing so, they are willing to trample upon the 
rights of other states and races. They are wide- 
eyed not for selfish reasons, perhaps, but surely 
not for broadly altruistic reasons. They would 
have their interests and those of their fellow citi- 
zens triumph at the expense of the rest of the 
world. None of these men can be convicted of 
a lack of attention to the world about them. The 
difference between them and the good man is 
this: that the former acquaint themselves with 
the world to consume the world, and the latter, to 
uplift the world. 

This indicates the criterion whereby we judge 
of a man's "public spirit." Without this admir- 
able personal characteristic, a man thinks in a 
small circle, is aware of a limited world, or else, 
conceiving of life in large dimensions, puts him- 
self, like a spider in his web, at the centre of the 
whole scheme. But possessing public spirit, he is 
first convinced of the fact that his fellow citizens 
are interesting people, their occupations, recrea- 
tions and careers in general are as vital to the 
community as his own, and their rights to be as 
firmly respected as he would have others respect 
his. He is thus a man of more than one idea, 
who includes humanity in the field of his interest- 
ing review, and who believes that his own life is 
worth nothing if not a part of the larger world- 



80 Unofficial Christianity 

whole. 

Another characteristic of the good man is: 
II. Absolute IVorld-Sensitiveness. He is 
touched with the feelings of the world's infirmi- 
ties. The pain of all mankind is his pain, and the 
joy of all mankind is his joy. Jesus gazes at 
Jerusalem and weeps the bitterest tears ever shed 
from mortal eyes. Why? Because it is the city 
which is soon to take his life? No. Because it 
is callous to God and deaf to righteousness. Sa- 
vonarola agonizes over Florence. Why? Because 
it is preparing the faggots and stake and torch 
for him? No. Because it has returned to its 
vanities and sensualities, like a dog to its vomit. 
Francis of Assisi breaks his heart over the monks 
of his new order. Why? Because they turned 
their backs on that which was dear to him? No. 
Because they have forsaken the Christ for wealth 
and honor and power. Why should Jesus con- 
cern himself about the fate of Jerusalem? Why 
should Savonarola be troubled about licentious 
Florence? Why should Francis mourn for weak 
Italian monks? They were responsible for none 
of these evils. They had tried to avert them. 
Why not wash their hands, Pilate-wise, of the 
whole transaction? Why worry when one is not 
blameworthy? Enough for a man to feel re- 
morse for his own delinquencies, without adding 
superfluous misery for misdoings which cannot 



Just Being Good 8 1 

be charged against him! In short: why expect 
that in the domain of moral evil a man should feel 
sorrow for that which he neither commits himself 
nor for which he is in the slightest degree respon- 
sible? The world would be a good bit nearer the 
millennium if every culpable man and woman in 
it recognized his and her culpability and tried to 
atone for it. 

But it is right at this point that the truly good 
advances beyond the merely respectable. It is 
not enough to mourn for your own sins and make 
atonement for your own transgressions. Not thus 
will the eternal realm of God come. Respecta- 
bility owns to its faults when it has been con- 
vinced of them, and seriously attempts rectifica- 
tion. But goodness feels pain for the faults of 
others, for which it is not in the slightest degree 
responsible, and disinterestedly tries to restore 
the sinner. It is just this extra sensitiveness to the 
sin of the world that marks the good man. No 
man is really moral who does not feel some of 
the pain of the evil and sting of the sin which has 
never come nigh him and which he never has 
committed. 

This is vicariousness. It is the capacity to 
enter into the world woe arising from world sin, 
with the end of promoting world righteousness. 
It is the real, poignant agony of good men and 
women everywhere to-day. The divine power to 



82 Unofficial Christianity 

feel the tragedy of life, from which one is per- 
sonally immune, — this it is upon which the hope 
of the world rests. In this sense Jesus "bore our 
griefs and carried our sorrows." In this sense 
"he was wounded for our transgressions and 
bruised for our iniquities." And in that same 
sense the good man carries the cross of the world 
to-day. Too often the malefactor is callous to 
his own sin; he is indifferent to the wreck and 
misery which it causes. Who feels the pain the 
deepest? The one who is free from all blame 
and removed from all the direct consequences, — 
the good man. The crime of the city rises as a 
reek to heaven, and who wears out the night 
watches in prayer and fasting and the day season 
in hoping and planning for cleaner things? The 
men and women who have not stained the fair 
name of the city nor turned it into the way of 
death. Why should they distress) themselves? 
There are no painful consequences which they 
should fear from the hand of the law. They are 
innocent of great transgression. They are even 
sure of escaping the misery and material loss 
which follows in the train of civic misdeeds. But 
their passion for civic righteousness is so con- 
suming that even though they are themselves 
blameless and immune from the disastrous conse- 
quences, they cry over the disgrace of their city 
with a great and bitter cry. A morality which 



Just Being Good 83 

cannot shake a man out of his own smug immacu- 
lateness and complacent respectability is as dead 
as the mummy of Pharaoh. The good man loves 
goodness so much that it is as a sword piercing 
his heart to see it scorned anywhere. He is cruci- 
fied afresh to save the world. He would lay down 
his life to lift up the ideal. 

A third and final trait of the good man is: 
III. Creative Social-Mindedness. Note what 
this ideal follower of morality has done. First, he 
has broadened the domain of his observation un- 
til it includes all humanity, and in his observation 
of men and manners he is actuated by good-will 
and magnanimous interest. Second, he not only 
feels a sensitiveness to wrong for which he is re- 
sponsible, but a pain for the tragic consequences 
of others' misdeeds, from the inconveniences or 
misfortunes of which he may be totally immune. 
But to altruistic attentiveness and absolute world- 
sensitiveness must be added a constructive faculty, 
that of creative social-mindedness. Viewing the 
world and feeling for the world from the most 
generous angle are not enough, — there must be 
action toward the ideal. The good man must 
take counsel with others of like disposition for 
the organization of righteousness, for the co-ordi- 
nation of right thinking and feeling, — in short, 
for the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. 
The age of an individualistic goodness is by. 



84 Unofficial Christianity 

There never was such a thing, although men 
thought there was. Mere decency and conven- 
tional respectability are content to keep the law, 
pay tithes of mint, anise and cummin and. thank 
God that they are not as other men are. Such 
making broad of phylacteries and general apothe- 
osis of Pharisaism will not save a man against the 
day of reckoning, neither will it build up a so- 
ciety that is worth the saving. No man can grow 
good alone. All goodness is social in its genesis 
or its exodus. So long as plums grow together on 
trees and men live together in society, so long 
will both plums and men ripen and rot collectively. 
Cashing in the remark, with a certain discount off 
when we remember the source, we may accept 
Shaw's words for what they are worth, that "a 
man who is better than his fellows is a nuisance." 
Surely a man who is devoid of creative social- 
mindedness, and solemnly labors to be good 
by himself in a corner, is at least an "undesirable 
citizen." But he who would surround the indi- 
vidual with the restraints and encouragements 
necessary for an organized, corporate, and collec- 
tive righteousness, takes the final step in the pur- 
suit of goodness. For he brings it into line with 
the processes of race and state and family develop- 
ment, which are in their essence and in their ex- 
pression purely social. 

The mainspring of such morality is religion. 



Just Being Good 85 

However true it may be that the church and offi- 
cial Christianity are not indispensable for the 
creation and fostering of altruistic attentiveness, 
world-wide sensitiveness and purposeful social- 
mindedness, it cannot be maintained that these 
ethical ideals grow out of the air or out of the 
rock. They take root in the good ground, which 
is religion in its deepest and most far-reaching 
sense. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses 
to this truth, for wherever we find men and women 
laboring most sacrificingly and perseveringly for 
human welfare, we find men and women who be- 
lieve that humanity has an eternally worth-while 
destiny. This is to believe in the permanence of 
the spiritual, which is essentially religion. Bald 
materialism and unblushing atheism do not sup- 
ply a platform broad enough to support a thor- 
oughgoing and consistent ethic. The social con- 
sciousness is possessed by those who know that 
God is, and that he is working out his eternal pur- 
poses in the stumbling pilgrimages of men, his 
children. The day is past when religion may say 
to ethics, "I will have none of thee," or when 
ethics may reply, "And I am not of thee." A 
faith in the divine order and the ultimate benefi- 
cent end of the universe, is a faith in God, and 
this faith it is which always has and always will 
nerve the arm of the moral man to service, and 
fill his heart with an unquenchable courage. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER 

OFFICIAL Christianity has had its day. 
That which is to be will not need the sanc- 
tion of established authority. It will be because 
it must be. It will be the renascence of that pro- 
phetic oracle, — "I will put my law in their in- 
ward parts and in their heart will I write it, saith 
the Lord." And it will be characterized broadly 
by the following traits. 

I. Democracy. Now is the judgment of this 
world on autocracy. Now is the emancipation 
of the imprisoned spirit of democracy. The king- 
doms of the world are becoming the common- 
wealths of the people. The twilight of the im- 
perial gods is here. Into every department of 
life and thought is the spirit of democracy filter- 
ing. Can religion escape it? Not for long, else 
it will pass into that limbo of myth and fable re- 
served for the worn-out superstitions of inani- 
mate races. 

But some will say, "Religion is and always 
has been democratic." Unpatronized by kings 

86 



The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 87 

and unformulated by councils, this may be true. 
True religion "bloweth where it listeth, and we 
hear the voice thereof, but know not whence it 
cometh and whither it goeth." Religion in a dog- 
matic straight- jacket has been and is the religion 
with which the world is most familiar. Religion 
formulated, crystallized, conventionalized, hob- 
bled by the weight of majority votes in ecumeni- 
cal councils, dressed out in obsolete verbiage and 
pranked out in disproved philosophies, — this is 
standardized religion, which would bend the free 
human spirit to wear its inflexible yoke, and in- 
tended by God to be a moving river of truth, be- 
come instead a stagnant dead sea. 

The undemocratic aspect of modern official 
Christianity is plainly noted in two directions: 
first, its creeds are rigid. Democracy demands 
that all forms of government, platforms of social 
relations, and expressions of faith, shall be flexi- 
ble enough to accommodate themselves to genuine 
and vital changes in men. An unmodifiable creed 
is as monstrous an anomaly as an unmodifiable 
machine. As the hand-press of Gutenberg, with 
its rough wooden types, is related to the multiple 
Hoe press with its linotype auxiliary to-day, — so 
should the creeds of the time of Luther be to the 
creeds of the present. A most casual glance at 
ecclesiastical dogma will satisfy the most sanguine 
reformer that this is not so. Instead of being an 



88 Unofficial Christianity 

instrument to express thought, the official creed 
to-day is one which represses thought. It should 
be elastic, mobile, responsive to needs, sensitive 
to creative ideas. With every turn of the wheel 
of time, new aspects of God's truth are brought 
to view. Is a stereotyped creed adequate intel- 
lectually and emotionally to set forth this new 
aspect? With every wind which blows from over- 
seas come tidings of triumphs of the democratic 
principle. Is an official creed competent to pic- 
ture forth the new soul relations which those vic- 
tories mean? Let any man, in his unsophisti- 
cated enthusiasm, attempt to mobilize the fixed 
creeds of Christendom in the interest of fresKly 
discovered truth, and he will discover speedily 
how worse than vain are all his honest efforts. 
The unofficial and freely working thought-forms 
of the future, candidly reflecting the experience 
of the growing race, will be democratic in their 
spirit. They will be open to revision from below 
up, and not from above down. Prelates and 
potentates will listen when the people rise up to 
say what they have learned about God. 

The second ground for a belief that official 
Christianity is not democratic, is the undeniable 
hostility of the proletariat toward it. A demo- 
crat will be quick to detect the spirit of democracy 
everywhere, and if he saw it in the orthodox 
creeds of the day, he would show his friendship 



The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 89 

for them. It is a matter of common knowledge, 
however, that wherever two or three of the par- 
tisans of democracy are gathered together, there 
is no official creed of Christendom in their midst. 
In their planning for the ideal state, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness, these passionate souls can 
find no corner where they may set up an orthodox 
dogma. The man who toils with his hand looks 
upon official Christianity to-day, and asks why the 
men with whom he can have no truce until a bet- 
ter industrial order prevails, are all in the places 
of honor and responsibility within the sacred in- 
stitution. This man who labors would worship 
God and serve him but finds no comfort in the 
forms which are the breath of life in the great 
churches about him. The simple fact that the 
mass of our church-membership is composed of 
the so-called middle class — the salaried, profes- 
sional, and capital-owning classes — is an evidence 
that the original purpose of Christianity, which 
was a solvent of all ranks and artificial distinc- 
tions, has been rather lost sight of. Rightly or 
wrongly, the average unchurched workingman re- 
gards the doctrines of official Christianity as 
shrewd attempts to becloud the bread-and-butter 
issues of life by exalting the virtues of "other- 
worldliness" and inculcating the doubtful grace of 
meekness under present injustice. Religion thus 
is considered as a comfortable device to keep the 



90 Unofficial Christianity 

poor man contented with his lot, while promising 
him a doubtful posthumous felicity. It is thus in- 
jurious to the framework of society by virtue of 
its platform of pure speculation and intangible 
rewards and punishments. Lulled to sleep by 
these poppied promises, and stranded upon the 
shore of the Lotus eaters, the proletariat may be 
regarded as safely disposed of while their heredi- 
tary antagonists, the employers and capitalists, 
pursue their predatory purposes, without molesta- 
tion or indictment. 

Untrue as this accusation against official Chris- 
tianity may be, the very fact that it can be made 
with a certain plausible passion, proves that all 
is not as it should be with the orthodox creeds and 
their defenders. When once the latter have been 
willing to democratize the former, and stand by k 
such radically revised platforms, consistently bear- 
ing out in their lives the professions which they 
make in their dogmas, then those who to-day are 
implacably hostile to religion as they know it may 
find it in their hearts to change their views of that 
institution inspired by the greatest Friend that 
the laborer ever had. 

II. Idealism. The pristine splendor of Chris- 
tianity was tarnished early by a lust for material 
possession. Conceived in the fires of a passion 
for universal good-will, truth, and righteousness, 
it bade fair to win the world to the most exalted 



The Conclusion of .the Whole Matter 91 

moral and spiritual standard ever lifted among 
men. Then came popularity, power, official rec- 
ognition, opulence, and the vision splendid faded 
into the common light of day. Christianity im- 
perialized became Christianity demoralized. The 
unique ethical elements which distinguished it 
from all other religious movements that ever had 
been, were lost in a mad scramble for place and 
worldly emolument. The Holy Roman Empire, 
the embodiment of the hierarchical system 
throughout the world, had sold its spiritual birth- 
right for a mess of pottage. The poison with 
which the body of Christianity was at that time 
infected has not been drained off since. Insen- 
sibly the church even to-day models her polity and 
constructs her creeds upon the lines laid down by 
the civil, temporal, and military powers. 

But what the world is really hungry for is some 
food which is not drawn from the granary of the 
carnal and material. It is just those men who 
have believed in the impossible, who have caught 
the attention of a jaded and harassed world in all 
ages. Never more than to-day, when pomp and 
circumstance and kings and captains and guns and 
drums pall on the appetite of nations, are weary 
peoples asking, "Has religion anything for us 
more than the false philosophies of force and 
fury have?" The terribly practical, the prosai- 
cally efficient, the coldly expedient, — these have 



92 Unofficial Christianity 

been the shibboleths of the nations. Now the hour 
has struck when the world must be saved by the 
forces of the spirit. Now is the appointed time 
for the rebirth of the idealism of Christ. Out of 
the welter of world war come voices more and 
more insisting that the discarded virtues of honor, 
truth, faith, patience, and sacrifice are to be the 
eternal foundations upon which a new civiliza- 
tion must be erected. Good for men as they have 
been found to be in the microcosm of the home and 
community and state, — they must be good for man 
in the macrocosm of inter-racial intercourse, and 
international reactions. And who is ordained to 
herald this new day more logically than the Chris- 
tianity which has wept to see its Master crucified 
afresh on the fields of Europe? Is she adequate 
to the task of proving that "love is the greatest 
thing in the world", that faith is sufficient to re- 
move mountains, that "he who loseth his life shall 
find it", that "righteousness exalteth a nation, but 
sin is a reproach to any people", that the founda- 
tions of the universe are laid in truth and justice, 
and that the Golden Rule is the supreme law of 
safe and sound world life? In brief, that "man 
does not live by bread alone, but by every word 
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." For 
this is idealism,* and in the waning of every other 

* The word "idealism" is used throughout in the above sec- 
tion in the popular sense, as opposed to that practical material- 






The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 93 

philosophy and the failure of every other panacea, 
to this solution of the way of life the weary world 
must come. 

III. Intelligence. Official Christianity may not 
be acquitted of an attitude of suspicion toward ripe 
scholarship. Ceasing to burn heretics, it abuses 
them. Stupidity has been termed less dangerous 
than learning. Orthodox theology and heterodox 
science have fought and bled and lived to fight 
again. Loyalty to the pet phrases of creeds has 
been more lauded than loyalty to the hard de- 
mands of truth. When Genesis and geology dis- 
agree there is a verdict in favor of the former 
only. Schools and colleges which teach their 
students to think are dangerous to religion. These 
and countless other professions of distrust and 
hostility have been hurled at the head of that in- 
telligence which sometimes contradicts the tenets 
of dogma. But such cannot continue long to be 
the case, if Christianity as a virile force is to sur- 
vive. If the processes of a sound and well-or- 
dered scholarship do not verify the assurances 
of an official creed, it is at least open to discussion 
whether the former may not be as near the mark 
as the latter. This much is true that creeds, which 
are supposed to be rational expressions of relig- 
ious faith, must be intelligent in their methods of 

ism which makes physical good the goal and enlightened self- 
interest the way of life. 



94 Unofficial Christianity 

arriving at results, or they stultify both them- 
selves and their makers. 

No institution changes its methods of doing 
business more slowly or with greater protest than 
the church. Experience which has proved of 
value in secular activities has been able to make 
few suggestions to the church because of its in- 
nate conservatism. In the organization of its 
Bible School, to mention only one instance, there 
are many weak links which make the whole chain 
liable to break under special strain. It has been 
computed carefully that fully fifty per cent of its 
students are lost, never to reurn, at the high school 
and adolescent age. Between 1908 and 19 14, in 
England, the leading free church showed a de- 
crease of nearly 260,000 members in its Sun- 
day-schools. To what shall the decline be attrib- 
uted? To antiquated methods of administration 
in part. But in larger measure to the unsym- 
pathetic attitude of many religious leaders toward 
more effective pedagogical methods based on the 
newer psychology, and their insensibility toward 
the results of the soundest scholarship as it re- 
lates itself to the Bible and the literature of 
morals. When pupils of the Sunday-schools reach 
the age of mental discrimination, it will not an- 
chor their faith in the teachings of Holy Writ to 
affirm dogmatically that their moral intuitions 
are untrustworthy because they do not endorse 



The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 95 

some Old Testament program of indiscriminate 
slaughter of enemies ; or that the apparent incon- 
sistencies in the Bible are in the mind of the 
reader; or that the Scriptures are ethically as well 
as historically infallible; or that the signal dis- 
play of favor on the part of the Almighty toward 
Israel has not been repeated toward non-Hebrew 
nations even unto this day; or that no other litera- 
ture save the Bible contains revelation which is 
profitable for salvation. The thinking student 
knows better than to believe all this, and to in- 
sist upon his accepting it can result only in lower- 
ing his opinion of the intelligence of the Sunday- 
school and alienating his affection from it. There- 
after it will be in vain that committees meet and 
bewail the defection of their youth from the 
church. Like school, like church; and when it 
comes to believing a teacher of Scripture on Sun- 
day, or a teacher of history or science or ethics 
the rest of the week, there is no shadow of doubt 
whom they will follow. 

Whatever may be the path which official Chris- 
tianity will tread through its orthodox pronounce- 
ments, it is evident that the Christianity which is 
to grip the heart of the present age will be one 
which hospitably welcomes the alliance of sound 
learning, and does not despise to throw the light 
of wisdom upon the road it follows. 

IV. Service. Religion is ubiquitous, not local; 



g6 Unofficial Christianity 

universal, not insular. This means that religion 
is not only for all people, but for all departments 
of life. If it points to a super-mundane destiny, 
it provides for a mundane economy. u Thy king- 
dom come on earth" is its watchword. However 
splendidly it rears its head among the stars, its 
feet are planted firmly on the ground. Official 
Christianity has conditioned salvation upon be- 
lief in the Lord Jesus Christ, and let the matter 
rest there. Unofficial Christianity supplements 
this indispensable condition by the word which 
shows how one is to believe in Christ. The 
former is the call to profession; the latter, while 
not belittling profession, makes it terminate in 
action. The Scriptural beacon-lights of the 
former are, "Ye must be born again," and "with 
the mouth confession is made unto salvation." 
The Scriptural beacon-lights of the latter are "not 
every one that saith unto me 'Lord, Lord' shall 
enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that 
doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven," 
and "he that heareth these words of mine and 
doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise man." 
The fatal fault of the salvation of orthodoxy is 
that it has always been too much of a "gabe" 
(gift) and too little of an "aufgabe" (task). It 
has been saturated with the mysticism of Paul, 
and has recognized too little the ethicism of Jesus. 
This may be demonstrated easily to the most seep- 






The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 97 

tical, by an examination of the official creeds of 
Christianity. In practically every case they will 
be found to be expositions of the doctrines of the 
apostle. Union with Christ and confession of 
Christ, justification by faith, baptism into the new 
life, the antinomy of the flesh to the spirit, the 
reconciling death on the cross and the personal 
second return of Jesus, — these and other doc- 
trines, which are pre-eminently Pauline and not 
those of the synoptic Jesus, are the material out 
of which the ecumenical creeds of history have 
been built. 

Now without stultifying itself by repudiating 
these tenets, which represent an intellectual ap- 
proximation of the richest Christian experience of 
the past, the unofficial beliefs of Christendom are 
to be more and more draw T n from the personality, 
example and teaching of the Jesus of the synoptic 
gospels. Men in his day who sought the way of 
salvation were directed into the pathway of self- 
denying service, because all men were brothers 
and God was their Father. The touchstone of 
loyalty to Christ was helpfulness. "Follow me" 
was the one unconditional demand of disciple- 
ship, and following him, his friends were taught 
to "heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out 
devils," preach the good news and give of them- 
selves in service as freely as they had received. 
The Golden Rule was the cornerstone of a per- 



9 8 Unofficial Christianity 

manent and worthy Christian edifice, and the as- 
surance, "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one 
of the least of these my brethren, ye have done 
it unto me," was the all-sufficient explanation of 
the meaning of belief in Christ. 

It would be hazardous to deny, therefore, that 
unofficial Christianity, while not renouncing the 
crystallized doctrinal expressions of a glorious 
past, will make short work of any system which 
minimizes Christ and magnifies Paul. "Christian- 
ity" has been too long a misnomer. Paulinism, 
Augustinism, Athanasianism, medievalism, — any 
and all of these have made creeds out of the dust 
of the ground and breathed into them the breath 
of their own life. 

That "inward eye" which is "the bliss of soli- 
tude" has revealed to the mystic poet who worked 
his visions out in practical helpfulness, what is 
the Alpha and the Omega of Christian living. 

"Our friend, our Brother, and our Lord, 
What may thy service be? 
Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word, 
But simply following thee. 

"We bring no ghastly holocaust, 
We pile no graven stone; 
He serves thee best who loveth most 
His brothers and thine own." 






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